Antonia Pozzi’s and Nan Shepherd’s Mountains: A Matter of Affect

ABSTRACT

This article undertakes a comparative reading of Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poetic and ecological relationship with mountain environments, combining affect theory and ecocriticism. The threefold structure follows a conceptual refrain borrowed from Zen philosophy. The first section, ‘First There Is a Mountain’, addresses sensual perceptions in the authors' poems through the lenses of new materialism, delineating the potential of an embodied knowledge of the landscape as it relates to appreciation of the dynamics of deep time, the sense of an ever-renewing life, and loving relationships with beings of all kinds. The second part, ‘Then There Is No Mountain’, focuses on how the autonomy of affect emerges in the works analysed as a pre-personal intensity that moves between and through human and other-than-human bodies. The final section, ‘Then There Is’, addresses the distinct outcomes of Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s affective relations with the mountain, respectively and differently influenced by Roman Catholicism and Buddhism.

SOMMARIO

Questo articolo propone una lettura comparata della relazione poetica e ecologica di Pozzi e Shepherd con gli ambienti montani, combinando teoria dell'affettività e ecocritica. La struttura tripartita segue un motivo concettuale preso in prestito dalla filosofia Zen. La prima sezione, ‘Prima c'è una montagna', affronta le percezioni sensuali nelle poesie delle autrici attraverso il filtro del nuovo materialismo, delineando il potenziale di una conoscenza incarnata, corporea del paesaggio, parallela all'apprezzamento delle dinamiche del tempo profondo, del senso di una vita che si rinnova di continuo, e di relazioni affettive con esseri di ogni specie. La seconda parte, ‘Poi non c'è alcuna montagna', esplora l'autonomia dell'affetto come un'intensità pre-personale che si muove tra e attraverso corpi umani e più-che-umani. La sezione finale, ‘Infine c'è la montagna’, investiga le specificità delle relazioni affettive di Pozzi e Shepherd con la montagna, rispettivamente e diversamente influenzate dal Cattolicesimo e dal Buddismo.

KEYWORDS:

• Antonia Pozzi
• Nan Shepherd
• ecocriticism
• new materialism
• affect theory
• Spinozan ethics

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Antonia Pozzi
• Nan Shepherd
• ecocritica
• nuovo materialismo
• teoria dell'affettività
• etica Spinoziana

Introduction

‘First there is a mountain, | Then there is no mountain, | Then there is’ – Donovan used to sing in 1967, condensing a passage of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s introduction to Essays in Zen Buddhism.¹ This sequence helps us appreciate, with the incisive efficacy of a refrain, a key conceptual concatenation in environmental ethics. Concreteness and materiality (‘First there is a mountain’) are essential for an understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings, which, on closer inspection, begin to loosen their ontological boundaries (‘Then there is no mountain’), only to re-emerge in a renewed mechanism of individuation that has productively metabolised openness and interdependence (‘Then there is’). The present article adopts the same threefold structure with reference to the affective connection uniting the mountain environment and the poetic production of Antonia Pozzi (1912–38), an assiduous explorer of the Grigna and other massifs in the Italian Alps, and Nan Shepherd (1893–1981), the poetic voice of the Cairngorms of north-east Scotland. This work aims to investigate, through close analysis of Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poetry, the potential of combining affect theory and ecocriticism, encouraged by recent interpretations of affect as a non-subjective process that is bound to invite dialogue with post-humanist thought.² If it is true – as Baruch Spinoza and later Gilles Deleuze contend – that affections (encounters with bodies) might increase or decrease our conatus (the power to maintain and affirm our existence), to what extent do bodily encounters with organic and inorganic others in the mountains concur with the constructive, even joyful acceptance of human existence as embedded in a relational ontology? And how can literature – in this specific case Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poetic production – both represent and reproduce such dynamics?

Although distant in space, Antonia Pozzi’s Grigna and Nan Shepherd’s Cairngorms have similarly inspired profound affection and delicate poetry in two writers whose names are inextricably connected to mountain landscapes, and whose poetic paths traverse the same time span, suspended between the First and the Second World War. It is impossible to talk of Antonia Pozzi without thinking about Pasturo, the village in the Valsassina on the slopes of the Northern Grigna that Pozzi first visited in 1918, at the age of six, and where she had the opportunity to live intermittently, over time growing attached to it as her refuge.³ The only child of a wealthy Milanese family, whose regressive political stance and powerful notions of honour and respectability impacted violently on her heightened sensitivity, Pozzi found her proper magister vitae in the natural environment of the Lombard Alps.⁴ The close connection between Pozzi’s poetic sensitivity and the mountain landscape is confirmed by a letter Pozzi wrote to her friend Lucia Bozzi in 1933, after a brief stay in San Martino di Castrozza, at the foot of the Dolomites: ‘ritorno con il cuore che straripa di poesia’ [‘I’m coming back with my heart full of poetry’], she writes.⁵ Her personal disposition was also impacted by the critical rationalism of Antonio Banfi, Pozzi’s philosophical guide at the University of Milan, which non-dogmatically combined experience and reason.⁶ It therefore comes as no surprise that Pozzi’s oeuvre – first published posthumously in 1939 under the title Parole and revised multiple times since⁷ – has been defined as a poetry in re, literally ‘in the things’,⁸ and that it developed as a form of embodied knowledge in close connection with the lived experience of the landscape.

An ‘intimate knowledge’ of the mountain, which is ‘at the same time affective and intellectual, practical and abstract’, also characterises Nan Shepherd’s production, as Carla Sassi has noted.⁹ Like Pozzi, who travelled throughout Italy, Europe, and North Africa, always returning to Pasturo as the keystone of her lyric geography, Shepherd explored Norway, France, Italy, Greece, and South Africa, but lived between times in the same house in Cults, a village on north Deeside on the outskirts of Aberdeen.¹⁰ From there, throughout her entire life, she never stopped exploring the Cairngorms on foot, dedicating specifically to these mountains her main works of poetry and non-fiction: In the Cairngorms, published in 1934 by the Moray Press of Edinburgh; and The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s, but only published in 1977 by Aberdeen University Press.¹¹ An exceptionally continuous physical experience of the ‘domestic geography’ of the Cairngorms – to refer to Gillian Carter’s conceptualisation – allowed Shepherd to wander, as she expresses it in the poem ‘Summit of Corrie Etchachan’, ‘in the climbing ecstasy of thought’ (C, 18), in a space where thinking is necessarily bodily.¹²

The initial section of the present contribution (‘First There Is a Mountain’) therefore seeks to explore precisely the relevance of bodily and sensual perceptions in Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poetic representations of mountain landscapes. New materialist approaches to the properties and behaviour of matter will be combined with elements of the foundational work of Baruch Spinoza, whose ethics is grounded in a physics of bodies in a state of continual encounter, on what Deleuze has termed the ‘immanent plane of Nature’.¹³ Such encounters between human and non-human bodies are understood as having the capacity to increase or decrease the potentialities of our very bodies, and therefore constitute forms of affect that are de-subjectifying: as Caroline Williams argues, Spinoza’s affect is ‘a kind of force or power that courses through and beyond subjects’.¹⁴ An affect theory premised upon Spinoza’s ethics thus emerges as integral to the ‘nonhuman turn’ whereby human beings not only accept their role as merely a part of nature, but also contextually acknowledge that their agency as human beings is dependent on the entanglements of their bodies with other bodies of all kinds.¹⁵

The autonomy of affect as a pre-personal intensity that exceeds the borders of subjectivity – according to Massumi’s definition¹⁶ – debunks traditional conceptions of individuality, as discussed in the second section (‘Then There Is No Mountain’). According to this view, the notion of conatus Spinoza defines in part three of his Ethics (Propp. vi–ix), while constituting every thing’s desire to persevere in existing, also represents the ‘fractural site through which affects have to pass’, since ‘[i]n order to promote its persistence, the conatus of any complex individual body (be it an eco-system, or a political collective, such as the multitude) will tend towards greater interaction and communication with its wider environment’.¹⁷ To talk about the non-subjective, trans-individual, impersonal nature of affectivity is not meant to deprive individuals of their existence, but rather to imbricate such existence in a web of relations where human beings, as well as animals, plants, and stones, constantly interact. In this regard, affect theory will productively dialogue with theories of neovitalism, of ‘a vital force animating change, movement, and growth’, which Samantha Walton has shown to be particularly relevant for Shepherd’s intellectual development.¹⁸

The porosity of the subject, de-constituted and re-constituted by the conatus, renders it open to provisional states of unity (‘Then there is [a mountain and a self]’), as well as to a number of forms of dissolution, as Williams maintains.¹⁹ The third part of this article will therefore examine the delineation of two different outcomes of Shepherd’s and Pozzi’s otherwise comparable affective relationships with their surrounding environments, which are conditioned, at least in part, by the two authors’ religious backgrounds – Roman Catholicism in the case of Pozzi, and a growing interest in Buddhism in the case of Shepherd. While Shepherd’s poetic and practical experience in the mountains reflects and fosters an affirmative joyfulness that is able to suffuse The Living Mountain with light, conjuring a place that becomes alive through the author’s very liveliness, Pozzi’s case is at the same time more ambiguous and more delicate. Pozzi committed suicide at the age of twenty-six and many opinions have been advanced over time in order to make sense of her act. All such hypotheses, despite their variety (excessive paternal control, lost loves, literary insecurity, and political discontent triggered by the racial laws of 1938),²⁰ share an understandable but hitherto unquestioned tendency to frame Pozzi’s suicide as a fundamentally negative, if not nihilistic act. As we will see, however, her affective closeness to the natural environment at least allows the possibility of interpreting her death also as a peaceful return to the earth, as a serene acceptance of the death–life cycles which constitutes the other face of the relationality of affects.

First There Is a Mountain: Sensory Encounters and Embodied Knowledge

A parallel reading of the output of two writers who belong to different cultures and emerge from location-specific traditions (the so-called Linea lombarda in Pozzi’s case, and the Scottish Literary Renaissance for Shepherd)²¹ reveals nonetheless a shared investment in material, bodily reality and the presence in their texts of a markedly similar participatory model of perception. In both cases, mountain landscapes represent a conglomerate of material data apprehended through the body, then elaborated in the form of ‘stony’ collections of poems, and thus in bodies of work that creatively return the reader to the materiality of the experience from which they originate. Samantha Walton emphasises the embodiment of geological principles, in particular, in Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, where ‘events and observations which took place over a period of around fifty years are brought up as and when they seem fit, according to the theme of the chapter’, creating a non-conformity that resembles the disturbed organisation of the depositional order of rock strata.²²

Past, present, and future tend to overlap like rocky records of different epochs also in Shepherd’s poetry collections, and a sense of deep time encroaches upon the chronological linearity assigned by the posthumous editors of Pozzi’s Parole. In ‘Tempo’, for example, Pozzi demonstrates what Armenta has defined as a ‘feminine’ way to knowledge, an ability to grow attuned to the cyclical sequence of seasons through the corporeal familiarity with the mountain and its flora: ‘Mentre tu dormi | le stagioni passano | sulla montagna. || […] || Mentre tu dormi | anni di sole passano | fra le cime dei làrici | e le nubi. || Io posso cogliere i mughetti | mentre tu dormi | perché so dove crescono’ (P, 74) [‘While you sleep | the seasons pass | on the mountain. || […] || While you sleep | years of sun pass | between the larches’ tops | and the clouds. || I can gather lilies of the valley | while you sleep | as I know where they grow’ (P, 75)].²³ The sense of ‘years gone by’ expressed in Shepherd’s short poem ‘Above Loch Avon’ (C, 2) also intersects a number of texts of In the Cairngorms, both in its original form and in the expanded version recently published by Galileo. In ‘Achiltibuie’, for instance, finding herself both on the ‘edge of Europe’ and on the ‘edge of being’ (C, 57) – thus outlining a significant parallel between her geographical environment and her own self – Shepherd refers to the experience of deep time as causing the crucial passage from the perception of corporeality to its sublation (‘First there is a mountain, | Then there is no mountain’): ‘I have fallen through time and found the enchanted world. | Where all is beginning. | […] the sea dissolves | And I too melt, am timeless, a pulse of light’ (C, 57).

‘Where all is beginning’, Shepherd writes. Indeed, the (a)temporal sensibility that goes hand in hand with a feeling of openness and wonder also tends to produce, in the works here analysed, a sense of life that is constantly renewing. In ‘Prati’ [‘Meadows’], for example, Pozzi expresses the continuity that links different beings in an all-encompassing and ever-expanding sensory process: ‘Ma noi siamo come l’erba dei prati | che sente sopra sé passare il vento | e tutta canta nel vento | e sempre vive nel vento’ (P, 32) [‘But us, we’re like the meadow grass | that above feels the wind pass | and all sings in the wind | and forever lives in the wind’ (P, 33)]. Similarly, in Shepherd’s ‘Blackbird in Snow’, the blackbird’s song is compared to light that shines ‘through lovely forms of stone, || Making the marble goddess tremble, | All soft and luminous, and live | With an intenser life’ (C, 17). As these passages show, sensory encounters and synaesthetic effects continually spark and foster new life. In particular, the eleventh chapter of The Living Mountain is overtly devoted to ‘The Senses’ (LM, 96–104), and the mountain landscapes in Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poetic collections are consistently evoked through sounds,²⁴ smells,²⁵ colours,²⁶ haptic consistencies,²⁷ and even tastes,²⁸ through which the mountain impacts materially on the self. This activates a process of substantial co-becoming, of intersubjective mutuality where the mountain’s and the self’s becoming-together prevails over their mere being.

Moreover, in Shepherd’s In the Cairngorms, as in many poems of Pozzi’s Parole – with certain exceptions that are analysed in the last section – the material encounters with the mountain are consistently depicted on a spectrum that relates them to joy,²⁹ grace,³⁰ ecstasy,³¹ desire,³² beatitude,³³ pleasure,³⁴ loveliness,³⁵ wonder,³⁶ and feyness³⁷ (as Shepherd explains in The Living Mountain, feyness ‘is an appetite that grows in feeding. Like drink and passion, it intensifies life to the point of glory. In the Scots term, used for the man who is abune himsel’ with drink, one is raised; fey; a little mad, in the eyes of the folk who do not climb’: LM, 6). In his Ethics, Spinoza maintains that joyful passions positively increase our powers to persevere in existence, while remaining within an order of extrinsic determination – as opposed to actions proper.³⁸ We will return in the third section to the different outcomes provoked by this conatus in Pozzi and Shepherd – that is, by the principle that animates how we strive to persist in the world. First, however, it is necessary to examine the two poets’ similar but not identical approach to the mountain as a ‘traffic of love’ (LM, xxxvii) – bearing in mind that, for Spinoza, love ‘is nothing else than joy accompanying the idea of an external cause’ (EIII, PXIV: E, 174).

According to Robert Macfarlane, ‘[t]here is, unmistakably, an eroticism tingling through [The Living Mountain], samizdat and surreptitious, especially thrilling because Shepherd was a woman writing at a time and in a culture where candour about physical pleasure was widely regarded with suspicion’.³⁹ Focusing in particular on Shepherd’s poetry, it is possible to detect her ‘lust for […] mountain top[s]’ (LM, 8) as a feeling that is not limited to her human experience, ‘A thought still in a god’s mind, | And yet there, meeting the eye, in the form of the gullies we love’ (C, 29). Rather, Shepherd’s own emotional bond with the mountain allows her to appreciate love’s impact on any ‘conative body’ populating the landscape:⁴⁰ ‘for sign of love to earth, | Those three dark bands [the three great rocks of Beinn Mheadhoin] are laid’ (C, 10); or, similarly, ‘The blackbird’s song with love is shaken’ (C, 16). According to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘material vitalism’,⁴¹ vitality is immanent in matter, and the same can be said after all about love, a multifarious affect that inter-involves every being. Shepherd’s poem ‘A Girl in Love’ perfectly exemplifies the dynamics of interdependency between human self and environment arising from an overarching love, validated by a new materialist interpretation of Spinoza’s view according to which ‘nature is always the same and is everywhere one’ (E, 162).⁴² The poem describes ‘the sun of […] desire’ that for the first time shines on the girl and makes ‘her ways | That we had thought dull earth […] burn’ (C, 27). An incisive parallel is thus advanced between the girl’s body and the corporeality of the mountain: ‘Her woods are shapes of fire, her frame | Is haloed with a fiery ring. || Her rocks, her hills, are kindled now. | Her nature and thy light combine, | And manifold in her art thou, | Her loveliness a part of thine’ (C, 27). It is worth noticing that, in ‘Love Eternal’ – part of the ‘Fourteen Years’ section in the 2020 collection In the Cairngorms and Other Poems – Shepherd describes two approaches to love that chime with Fromm’s distinction in To Have or To Be? (1976):⁴³ ‘There are two ways of loving. One must own: | Jealous, exclusive, careless of the event, […] | And one is free and unconcerned as air | Or subtle ether or the wash of light’ (C, 48). Shepherd’s love for the Cairngorms is precisely that ‘free and unconcerned’ affection which allows the poet to be intimately woven into a web of relations where her human feelings are equated to the behaviour of air, ether, and light.

Pozzi’s love for the mountain also constitutes the entry point to a broader appreciation of the surrounding world: ‘Perché non portare | laggiù, nelle strade, la mia | nostalgia dei monti perduti, | tradurla in amore | pel mondo | che amai?’ (p, 100) [‘Why not carry | My longing for the lost mountains | Down with me into the streets, | Transforming it into love | For the world | I used to love?’ (p, 101)]. By finding her own self in the old world of the mountains (‘io troverò me stessa | nel vecchio mondo’: p, 102), Pozzi envisages a ‘profondo | […] abbraccio | delle cose con me’ (p, 102) [‘all things and I | Will be united | In a profound embrace’ (p, 103)]. However, in her poetry, an impersonal love for the surrounding environment proves to be dependent on the presence of another human being, Antonio Maria Cervi, the man Pozzi loved in her youth. It is through the love she feels for Cervi that Pozzi’s affection for the natural environment is made more vivid, although her use of the past tense confirms the impossibility of such affect: ‘Aveva voce in te | l’universo | delle cose mute, | la speranza | che sta senz’ali nei nidi, | che sta sotterra | non fiorita’ (p, 108) [‘You gave voice | To the universe | Of all dumb things, | To hope | Which has no wings and lies within the nests, | Which lies below the soil | And has not flowered’ (p, 109)]. In contrast to Shepherd, in Pozzi’s oeuvre the mountain environment, although often described in terms that associate it with romantic love, does not represent a totalising source and target of the poet’s positive affect, often overcome by the sadness and nostalgia caused by the impossibility of her love for Cervi. If Shepherd recognises an affirmative lust for life to be an inherent part of the mountain and shares it with every being populating her ‘secret place of ease’ (LM, XXXVII), Pozzi more often identifies with flowers ‘precariously clinging to a cliff, while existence flows away like a river in which she cannot bathe’.⁴⁴ We will return in the third section to the consequences of this fundamental difference in the two authors’ affective attitude towards the mountain. Before doing that, however, it is important to examine how affect works in their texts, in the light of a neovitalism that radically resists anthropocentrism.

Then There Is No Mountain: Affective Assemblages beyond Anthropocentrism

According to Serpil Oppermann, ‘all material life experience is implicated in creative expressions’.⁴⁵ Anticipating this material ecocritical stance, Pozzi writes in ‘Echi’ [‘Echoes’]: ‘Da lontani orizzonti viene il vento | e scrive parole segrete | su l’erba: | le rimormorano i fiori | tremando nelle lievi | corolle’ (P, 64) [‘From far horizons comes the wind | and writes secret words | over grass: | the flowers murmur them again | trembling in their delicate | corollas’ (P, 65)]. Similarly, in Shepherd’s ‘Singing Burn’, the titular watercourse ‘new-creates the tune it sings’ (C, 1). These brief examples acquire even more relevance when taking into account Michael Gallagher’s view of sound as a kind of relational affect, as ‘an intensity that moves bodies, a vibration physically pushing and pulling their material fabric’.⁴⁶ The mountain burn, for instance, sings an ever-renewing tune whose waves reach Shepherd’s ‘haunted ear’ (C, 1), as much as animals’ auditory systems and stones. Such waves that move through and between bodies contribute to questioning the centrality of the human, which is just one element in a vibrational and affective assemblage that can only be understood in its fullness beyond anthropocentrism.

As suggested at the outset, the new materialist ethics that emerges from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza is based on an understanding of affects as forms of encounter that circulate among and within bodies of all kinds. Williams argues that affect should be intended as ‘an impersonal force anchored in a relational ontology’, as a ‘transindividual social bond’ substantiating assemblages that productively undermine the borders of (human) subjectivity.⁴⁷ Indeed, in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze proposes to consider two fundamental Spinozan questions as equivalent; namely, ‘What is the structure of a body?’ and ‘What can a body do?’. Responding to Spinoza’s provocation in the scholium to proposition II in Ethics III – ‘no one has hitherto determined what the body is capable of […] For no one has hitherto known the body so accurately as to be able to explain all its functions’ (E, 165) – Deleuze intimates that what a body can do according to its structure ‘corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected’.⁴⁸ It comes as a consequence that affects do not originate from a space of subjective interiority, but rather represent a pre-personal flow that involves humans and things alike, passing often ‘below the threshold of cognitive awareness’.⁴⁹

When considering the heteronomy of affects, sounds included, the horizontalisation of ‘the relations between humans, biota and abiota’ advocated by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter emerges as inevitable, as does the blurring of the ontological boundaries of each being (‘Then there is no mountain’).⁵⁰ In Lordon’s words, for Spinoza ‘an affect is something an affection (an encounter with something) does to me (causing joy or sadness), and consequently what it makes me do’.⁵¹ When expanding the concept of ‘self’ – of ‘me’ in this quotation – to include any form of life, non-human affects reveal themselves to be immanent in the human capacity to think and feel. Therefore, the anthropomorphisation of plants, stones, and even atmospheric agents and stars in Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poems represents a subtle rhetorical artifice which, by foregrounding the shared materiality of beings, synthesises the three conceptual steps investigated in this article: first there is the recognition of external concrete entities, then there is the awareness of a fundamental continuity binding the self to such entities, from which both parties emerge as mutually enriched in a pregnant analogical correspondence. 

Pozzi describes ‘dita congiunte dei pioppi [che] | […] s’inanellano di stelle’ (P, 22) [‘conjoined poplar fingers [that] | […] are ringed with stars’ (P, 23)]; ‘pietre | volte all’Oriente [che] | […] parevano visi di ciechi’ (P, 40) [‘stones | turned eastward [that] | […] seemed blind men’s faces’ (P, 41)]; as well as ‘rocce [che] | sui grandi libri rosei del tramonto | leggono ai boschi e alle case | le parole della pace’ (p, 90) [‘rocks [that] | Are reading from the great rose-hued books | Of the sunset | The words of peace to the woods and the houses’ (p, 91)]. Shepherd opens her collection with the image of a ‘Singing Burn’, as already mentioned, and in ‘Lux Perpetua’ she compares the appearance of ‘the first full star’ to ‘the tranquil motion of a priest’ (C, 12). Conversely, Pozzi’s ‘carezze’ [‘caresses’] fall ‘come foglie ingiallite d’autunno’ (P, 6) [‘like the yellowed leaves of autumn’ (P, 7)], and she refers to her ‘lento | […] andar di fiume che non trova foce’ (P, 70) [‘slow | going as a river that finds no end’ (P, 71)]. In Shepherd’s ‘Above Loch Avon’, human souls are received, after marching, by an ‘awful loneliness | […] as air receives the smoke’ (C, 2). In all these cases, the poets give voice to comparable modes of existence and affection across different agents composing the surrounding environment: anthropomorphic modes that, as Bennett puts it, ‘can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances – sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure’.⁵²

What characterises the metaphors and similes here examined, selected among many images of interconnection in Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poems, is also the recurring reference to verbs and nouns in the semantic field of movement. Stones turn eastward, the first full star makes a tranquil motion, leaves and caresses fall down, and the river goes slowly on. The essence of human and other-than-human life is equivalent to a process of constant becoming, which, precisely like a flow of affect always in motion, intersects all beings from within and from outside. In ‘The Hill Burns’, Shepherd neatly condenses this dynamic: ‘Out of fire, terror, blackness and upheaval, | Leap the clear burns, | Living water, | Like some pure essence of being, | Invisible in itself, | Seen only by its movement’ (C, 9). In addition, in The Living Mountain we read that ‘[t]he sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower’ (LM, 26), and that heather ‘too is integral to the mountain. For heather grows in its most profuse luxuriance on granite, so that the very substance of the mountain is in its life’ (LM, 50–51). Matter is traversed and animated by a vital essence, conceivable also in terms of affect, which manifests itself through motion: the motion of ‘pure waters | […] from the adamantine rocks, | The granites and schists’ (C, 8), as well as the motion of the mountain’s substance from granite again to heather. If it is true that ‘affect need not be felt’, that it does not need to be perceived in order to exist,⁵³ by the same token, the natural environment follows its own rhythms and movements independent of the human presence, which only occasionally happens to intercept such dynamism through the senses.

A comparative reading of Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s poems inspired by their life-long relationship with the mountains allows us to appreciate the extent to which affects cannot be thought without consideration of an environmental context.⁵⁴ In Bennett’s interpretation of neovitalism, affect is equated with materiality, rather than being posited as ‘a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body’.⁵⁵ Moreover, in Spinoza’s view, each body is always composite, thus it exists as a set of relations within its components and with other bodies of all kinds (EIV, pxxxix: E, 255). Consequently, affect is always more than the (human) subject. In order to fully experience being, ‘there is a negation to undergo | To know oneself blank, blind, worthless, rejected, done, | A stranger in the outwash of a bitter sea’, as Shepherd writes in ‘Rhu Coigach’ (C, 60). The negation of the mountain in Suzuki’s Zen teaching necessarily involves the parallel negation of the self. ‘Place and a mind’ loosen their ontological limits and ‘may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered’ (LM, 8), revealing what Karen Barad defines as their intra-becoming, premised upon the hidden unity of their materiality and affectivity.⁵⁶

Then There Is: Towards a Heightened Awareness of the Self in the Environment

Pozzi’s and Shepherd’s encounters with the mountain environment, while similarly engendering an awareness of the interdependence between self and world that ascribes them securely to the category of ecological writers, nonetheless develop in the context of two very different personal destinies. Shepherd describes ‘Strange gifts of pleasure [of] the mind’ when ‘De-formed, annulled, unmade, | She feels the whole creation drown, | The ache of form allayed. || The streaming seas, the ocean gulf, | The rocks, dissolve away. | Now she may re-create herself. | Now is the primal day’ (C, 14). The ambiguous illumination gained through undergoing and exceeding sensory experiences (‘First there is a mountain, | Then there is no mountain’), which is granted to those ‘men [sic]’ who ‘with startled rapturous eyes | See the unseen at last’ (C, 6), engenders in Shepherd’s poetry an affirmative relational ethics. She appreciates her own and others’ existences and experiences as part of what Despret and Meuret define as ‘experimental cosmoecology’, learning to hold possibilities open towards constant re-creation, ‘learning attentiveness to the infinite ways of being affected and of affecting’.⁵⁷ By way of contrast, the cyclical and always-renewing nature of multispecies relationships produces in Antonia Pozzi a heightened awareness of ‘questa fine che torna ogni anno, | che è nuova ogni anno’ (P, 76) [‘this end that returns each year | and each year’s new’ (P, 77)]. In the process of overcoming individualism and a fixed self-identity, Pozzi opts for a literal return to the earth, for a death the final part of this article will seek to understand beyond romantic, as well as moralistic stereotypes.

In the Asian tradition, a ‘return to immanence’ – which corresponds to the third step in the conceptual sequence under analysis (‘Then there is’) – is the literal translation of yoga. Shepherd refers to ‘the controlled breathing of the Yogi’ (LM, 106) as a parallel for those moments when, after hours of walking, ‘motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the “still centre” of being’ (LM, 106). Walton also evokes yoga with respect to another significant passage of The Living Mountain, where Shepherd writes:

Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by springs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. […] Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. (LM, 11)

This decentralisation of one’s own point of view also chimes with the image of the net of Indra in Kegon (the Japanese transmission of the Hua-yen school of Chinese Buddhism). According to this fractal model of reality, ‘each dharma [phenomenon] is like a multifaceted jewel located at the nexus of a web. Each jewel stands alone, but each of its facets reflects one of the other jewels’.⁵⁸ In order to ‘view the tree without disguise’ (C, 19) – or to view the mountain, to stay with the image to which this analysis has referred – Shepherd wilfully participates in a reality that does not terminate in the production of her own limited perspective. Rather, she accepts that her self-identity is no longer the primary organising principle of this very reality – one of the conditions for becoming that underpin Deleuze’s Spinozism.⁵⁹

The ecological sense of interdependence that considers the environment a complex ecology of human and other-than-human selves is referred to by Shepherd in terms of ‘mountain’s wholeness’:

Saxifrage – the ‘rock-breaker’ – in some of its loveliest forms, Stelloris, that stars with its single blossoms the high rocky corrie burns, and Azoides, that clusters like soft sunshine in their lower reaches, cannot live apart from the mountain. As well expect the eyelid to function if cut from the eye. (LM, 48)

I would suggest that the incisive brutality of the final comparison in this quotation is not accidental, but refers again to a characteristically Buddhist imagery. Bodhidharma, the monk who brought Chan Buddhism from India to China and who is said to have sat in silent meditation for nine years, is traditionally represented with no eyelids: as the story goes, in order to avoid getting sleepy while practising zazen (seated meditation), he tore off his eyelids and threw them on the ground, where they turned into a tea plant – whose leaves have long been known for their energising properties.

This interpretation is further sustained by the final paragraph of The Living Mountain, where Shepherd takes stock of the experiences so accurately detailed in that book, as well as in In the Cairngorms, and compares them to Buddhist pilgrimages:

I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain. (LM, 108)

The ‘total experience’ (LM, 105) offered by the mountains allows Shepherd to recompose ‘in’ and ‘out’, sensory perceptions, and ‘the world without the show | That opens to the sense’ (C, 6). Macfarlane inscribes this movement within a generic ‘theology of matter’,⁶⁰ while Samantha Walton’s analysis of the commonplace books Shepherd collected between 1911 and 1950 locates Shepherd’s stance more specifically in Buddhism – but also in mysticism, theosophy, and the philosophy of Simone Weil. As Walton goes on, ‘Shepherd never adopted Buddhism outright, but the notion that nature possesses mind-like qualities informs much of her writing’, where ‘[c]hance experiences of oneness affect a transformation in the self’,⁶¹ finally able to merge a physical and metaphysical insight into the nature of the mountain and of being in general.

Pozzi’s poems similarly betray a metaphysical strain that is, however, more tormented and problematically balanced by the physicality of the writer’s personal experiences. Armenta identifies a distinctive posture of Pozzi’s work in ‘an ascensional desire, a longing for absoluteness’, which Strazzeri and Bernabò have specifically associated with the recurring image of the mountains pointing to the sky.⁶² Describing her first rock climbing experience in a letter to her grandmother written in August 1929, and later refashioned into the poem ‘Dolomiti’, Pozzi states that ‘le guglie pallide non sembrano monti, ma anime di monti, irrigidite in volontà d’ascesa’ [‘these pale spires look like souls of mountains, more than mountains, stiffened in the shape of their desire to ascend’].⁶³ Many of Pozzi’s poems set in the mountains are indeed characterised by a vertical movement pointing to a communion with the whole, and she accordingly longs for higher altitudes when far from her Grigna, as in ‘Pianura’ [‘Plain’] and ‘Prati’ [‘Meadows’].⁶⁴

Raised in a conservative Roman Catholic environment, Pozzi seems to retain from that religious background the longing for a higher truth. At the same time, to paraphrase Pasolini, the poet ‘sent[e] il mancare di ogni religione | vera’ [‘feel[s] the lack of any true | religion’],⁶⁵ and transfers her ascensional desire onto the materiality of her beloved mountains. Where Shepherd, in the face of the sublimity of the landscape, manages to bring together ‘the sensory awareness and limitlessness of the self’ in her poetry and in an approach to life that is unquestionably affirmative,⁶⁶ Pozzi rather gains from her familiarity with the mountain the sense of a shared fragility: ‘ebbri d’immenso, | inalberiamo sopra l’irta vetta | la nostra fragilezza ardente. In basso, | la roccia dura piange’ (P, 34) [‘drunk with the immensity, | we raise above the bristling summit | our ardent frailty. | Down below, | the hard rock weeps’].⁶⁷

As suggested in the first section of this article, a number of Pozzi’s poems contradict the general sense of a joyful relationship with the mountain: ‘Scende la notte – | nessun fiore è nato – | è inverno – anima – | è inverno’ (P, 36) [‘Night’s falling – | no flower has bloomed – | it’s winter – soul – | it is winter’ (P, 37)]; ‘Con uno smunto sorriso i colchici | chiedon perdono d’essere nati’ (p, 68) [‘The autumn crocus, with a tenuous smile, | Ask for forgiveness that they should be born [sic]’ (p, 69)].⁶⁸ In each of these cases, however, the poet suggests a parallel between her experience and an element of the landscape, finding a somehow comforting foothold in a sense of communal sadness, thus expanding to a cross-species dimension the relevance of Leopardi’s ‘social catena’ [‘social bond’] in ‘La ginestra’ [‘Broom’].⁶⁹ In ‘La porta che si chiude’ [‘The Closing Door’], the inevitability of death is openly equated with an experience of peace (P, 26–27); further, in ‘Funerale senza tristezza’ [‘Funeral with No Sorrow’], Pozzi envisages such an eventuality as a process of ‘coming back | to the village’ (P, 59) – a metaphorical village, but also, most probably, Pasturo – ‘per aerei ponti | di cielo, | per candide creste di monti | sognati, | all’altra riva, ai prati | del sole’ (P, 58) [‘by airy bridges | of sky, | by pure-white crests | of dreamed mountains, | to the other shore, to the meadows | of sun’ (P, 59)]. In her last letter, a veritable testament to her parents before dying, Pozzi indeed writes: ‘Desidero essere sepolta a Pasturo, sotto un masso della Grigna, fra i cespi di rododendro. Mi troverete in tutti i fossi che ho tanto amato. E non piangete, perché ora io sono in pace’ [‘I wish to be buried in Pasturo, under a rock of the Grigna, among rhododendron tufts. You will find me in any of the trenches I used to love. And please do not cry, as I am now resting in peace’].⁷⁰

This article has approached Spinoza’s Ethics as an embodied practice of thought where the self is constantly affected by, and in turn affects, the powers of others – be they people, animals, plants, stones, or anything else. Consciousness emerges as a fundamentally decentralised entity, which is able to go through its own negation, only then to re-affirm its existence in a more porous, open fashion. While Shepherd’s oeuvre and life-long acquaintance with the Cairngorms exemplify this process with luminous liveliness, Pozzi undertakes the negation of her own self more radically, directly experiencing a troublesome interference between being and non-being. If affects can be understood as ‘transitive states through which bodies pass’,⁷¹ Pozzi allows subjectivity and intersubjectivity to mingle to the point where it is no longer relevant to distinguish between her human body and the earth to which she longs to return. Pozzi’s poetry already testifies to the possibility of a phenomenological rebirth of both the self and the affects through which it has passed, with her death constituting the not necessarily nihilistic concretisation of her insight into the contingent limits of human life, which continues in any other form of life with which it has ever come into affective contact.⁷² As Suzuki writes in the same page of the tripartite teaching on the (non)existence of the mountain, ‘there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between the finite and the infinite’, since ‘the peace we are seeking so eagerly after has been there all the time’.⁷³

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Irish Research Council and of University College Dublin.

Notes

1 D. Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series) (London: Rider & Company, 1949), p. 24.

2 See in particular C. Williams, ‘Affective Processes without a Subject: Rethinking the Relation between Subjectivity and Affect with Spinoza’, Subjectivity, 3 (2010), 245–62; and J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

3 For a thorough analysis of the relationship between Pozzi and the Alps, see M. Dalla Torre, Antonia Pozzi e la montagna (Milan: Ancora, 2022).

4 I am referring here to the stringent vetoes imposed by Roberto Pozzi on his daughter’s loves: first Antonio Cervi because of his older age, then Dino Formaggio on the grounds of his social status.

5 As far as Pozzi’s letters are concerned, see L’età delle parole è finita: Lettere 1923–1938, ed. by A. Cenni and O. Dino (Milan: Archinto, 2002).

6 C. Glori, Le madri montagne: Antonia Pozzi, Poesie 1933–1938 (Foggia: Bastogi Editrice Italiana, 2009), p. 225.

7 After the first 1939 edition, Parole was re-issued in 1948 in Mondadori’s ‘Lo Specchio’ series, with a preface penned by Eugenio Montale. A further edition of Parole, edited by Vittorio Sereni, appeared from Mondadori in 1964. In 1986, Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino prepared for publication La vita sognata e altre poesie, which was followed in 1989 by a new edition of Parole. Cenni also edited Tutte le opere, appeared from Garzanti in 2009, as well as the most recent revised edition of Pozzi’s Poesie, lettere e altri scritti, published by Mondadori in 2021. For the editorial history of Pozzi’s poems, see also P. Robinson, ‘Introduction’, in A. Pozzi, Poems (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2015), pp. xi–xxiii. In this article, I will quote mainly from this 2015 Italo–English edition of Pozzi’s Poems, referenced as P; in a few cases, I will also refer to the previous bilingual edition published in 1955 by John Calder, with translations by Nora Wydenbruck, as p; the poem ‘Dolomiti’, which does not appear in either of these bilingual editions, is taken from Poesie, prefaced by Antonella Anedda (Milan: Garzanti, 2021), referenced as P.

8 The definition of ‘poesia in re’ was first advanced by L. Baffoni-Licata in ‘La meteora esistenziale e poetica di Antonia Pozzi’, Italian Culture, 9.1 (1991), 355–69 (p. 358).

9 C. Sassi, ‘A Quest for a (Geo)poetics of Relation: Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain’, in Re-visioning Scotland: New Readings in the Cultural Canon, ed. by K. MacDonald and C. Sassi (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 68–80 (p. 73).

10 For a contextualisation of Shepherd’s life, see the ‘Introduction’ to S. Walton, The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 1–28 (pp. 3–8).

11 With respect to the editorial history of Shepherd’s works, see also R. Macfarlane’s ‘Introduction’ to The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014), pp. vii–xxxiv (pp. viii–xii), as well as Macfarlane’s ‘Foreword’ to In the Cairngorms and Other Poems (Cambridge: Galileo Publishers, 2020), pp. ix–xiv (p. ix). Considering that more critical attention has been devoted to The Living Mountain over the years, the present article shifts the focus somewhat towards In the Cairngorms, while referring also to Shepherd’s prose where necessary. These books will be referenced respectively as LM and C.

12 G. Carter, ‘“Domestic Geography” and the Politics of Scottish Landscape in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 8.1 (2001), 25–36.

13 G. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), p. 124. See also T. Roberts, ‘In Pursuit of Necessary Joys: Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Becoming Active’, GeoHumanities, 5.1 (2019), 124–38.

14 Williams, p. 246.

15 R. Grusin, ‘Introduction’, in The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. vii–xxix.

16 B. Massumi, ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. xvi–xix (p. xvi).

17 Williams, pp. 251–52.

18 Walton, p. 141.

19 Williams, p. 257.

20 A. Cenni, In riva alla vita: Storia di Antonia Pozzi poetessa (Milan: Rizzoli, 2002), p. 32; A. R. Godey, Sister Souls: The Power of Personal Narrative in the Poetic Works of Antonia Pozzi and Vittorio Sereni (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), p. 21.

21 The Linea lombarda, or Lombard line, is understood – after an anthology edited in 1952 by Luciano Anceschi – as a poetic tradition, developed by Lombard poets devoted to a sober lyrical representation of everyday, often marginal things, usually pervaded by a disenchanted, anti-idealistic undertone. See also D. De Camilli, ‘Linea Lombarda trent’anni dopo’, Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana, 14.2 (1985), 289–96. Walton defines the Scottish Literary Renaissance as ‘an interwar modernist movement which rejected sentimental stereotypes of Scottish rural life and embraced international avant-garde aesthetics’. The movement was ‘largely committed to Scots and Gaelic revival as a means of recovering lost cultural practices and countering the cultural colonialism of the English tradition’. See Walton, p. 1; pp. 21–27.

22 Walton, p. 113.

23 A. Armenta, ‘Estranged Flowers: Plant Symbolism in Antonia Pozzi’s and Krystyna Krahelska’s Poems’, Language and Literary Studies of Warsaw, 9 (2019), 13–26 (p. 15).

24 Sounds: ‘Per voi taccion le strade | e tace il bosco d’abeti’ (P, 38) [‘For you the roads grow silent | and silent the fir-wood’ (P, 39)]; P, 48–49; 50–51; 64–65; 72–73; 82–83; 96–97; 114–15; 120­–21; ‘So quick, so clear, a hundred year | Singing one song alone’ (C, 1); C, 3; 8; 12; 15; 16–17; 23.

25 Scents: ‘Odor di verde – | mia infanzia perduta – | […] || odor di boschi d’agosto – al meriggio – | […] || odor di terra’ (P, 56) [‘Scent of green – | my lost childhood – | […] || scent of August woods – at midday – | […] || scent of earth’ (P, 57)]; ‘breathe that blue serene’ (C, 6).

26 Colours: ‘col sole in viso | – il cervello penetrato di rosso | traverso le palpebre chiuse’ (P, 14) [‘with sun on my face | – the brain pierced by red | through eyelids closed’ (P, 15)]; P, 36–37; 38­–39; 40–41; 42–43; 50–51; 52–53; 76­–77; 86–87; 96–97; 136–37; ‘The pool, black as peat’ (C, 3); C, 4; 8; 10; 18; 24.

27 Haptic consistencies: ‘l’erba gelida e affilata | mi sfiorava i polpacci’ (P, 12) [‘the sharp and frozen grass | was grazing my calves’ (P, 13)]; P, 52–53; 56–57; ‘The steep rock-path, alongside which, from under | Snow-caves, sharp-corniced, tumble the ice-cold waters’ (C, 18).

28 Tastes: ‘amari | rododendri’ (P, 48) [‘bitter | rhododendrons’ (P, 49)]; P, 12–13; 14–15; 124–25; ‘Caul’, caul’ as the wall | […] And fierce, and bricht, | This water’s nae for ilka mou’, | But him that’s had a waucht or noo, | Nae wersh auld waters o’ the plain | Can sloke again’ (C, 21).

29 Joy: ‘Come | chi avanti l’alba | da un rifugio montano esca | nell’ombra fredda – e si metta per l’erta | […] fin che in cima alle ghiaie | la guida sciolga | dalla spalla la corda ed additi | sulla roccia – l’attacco – || gioia e sgomento | allora – ed il sole che sorge | lo colgono insieme’ (p, 78) [‘Like one | Who emerges | From a mountain shelter before sunrise | Into the chill darkness – and begins to climb | […] till, at the top of the bluff, | The guide lifts the rope from his shoulders | And both prepare | For the assault on the rocks – || And he is seized | By joy and terror – and the splendour | Of the rising sun’ (p, 79)]; ‘But still I must remember how the sound | Of waters echoed in my ear all night, | How fitfully I slumbered, waked, and found | The singing burns, the cataracts, the might || Of tumults drunken with the melting snow, | Filling the starry darkness with their joy’ (C, 23).

30 Grace: ‘Chi ti dice | bontà | della mia montagna? – | così bianca | sui boschi già biondi | d’autunno – || […] || Bontà | a cui beve il suo canto | il cuore | e di cantare non può più finire’ (p, 84–86) [Who can describe you | Grace | Of my mountain – | So white | Above the woods which autumn | Already is gilding – || […] || Grace, | Fountain from which the heart | Drinks in its song | And cannot cease to sing’ (p, 85–87)].

31 Ecstasy: ‘In that pure ecstasy of light | The bush is burning bright’ (C, 11); C, 18.

32 Desire: ‘Giuncheto lieve biondo | come un campo di spighe | presso il lago celeste || […] || Desiderio di cose leggere’ (P, 46) [‘Blond light rush-bed | like a field of wheat | near the sky-blue lake || […] || Desire for light things’ (P, 47)]; ‘The morning star within my shaken brain, | My world a-tremble with a new desire, | Dwelt-in by life I may not fully know’ (C, 22).

33 Beatitude and goodness: ‘mentre le rocce, in alto, | sui grandi libri rosei del tramonto | leggono ai boschi e alle case | le parole della pace – || […] || ed il silenzio allarga, | impallidendo, le braccia – | trae nel suo manto le cose | e persuade | la quiete’ (p, 90) [‘While the rocks on the summit | Are reading from the great rose-hued books | Of the sunset | The words of peace to the woods and the houses – || […] || Then the silence grows paler | And holds out its arms, | Drawing all things under its mantle | And invoking | Tranquillity’ (p, 91)]; ‘Form as of boughs, but boughs of fire, | That flicker and aspire, | Or stand in stilled beatitude | And shine, which is their good’ (C, 11).

34 Pleasure: ‘Strange gifts of pleasure has the mind’ (C, 14).

35 Loveliness: ‘a golden hour | Of magical and lovely light’ (C, 6).

36 Wonder: ‘Si spalancano laghi di stupore | a sera ne’ tuoi occhi | […] a specchio | della gran cima coronata di nuvole … ’ (p, 174) [‘Lakes of amazement open out | In your eyes at night | […] that mirror | The great peak crowned with clouds … ’ (p, 175)]; P, 50–51; ‘The flooded meads! I gazed on them with wonder’ (C, 23).

37 Feyness: ‘But aye he clim’s the weary heicht | To fin’ the wall that loups like licht, | Caulder than mou’ can thole, and aye | The warld cries oot on him for fey’ (C, 21).

38 See also G. Burdon, ‘On Being Affected: Desire, Passion, and the Question of Conatus after Spinoza and Deleuze’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47 (2022), 682–94 (pp. 688–89).

39 Macfarlane, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi.

40 In the ‘Preface’ to Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett invokes Spinoza’s ‘idea of conative bodies that strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliances with other bodies’. See Bennett, p. x.

41 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, in A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 351–423.

42 B. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. by G. Eliot, ed. by C. Carlisle (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press). From now on referenced as E. New materialism appreciates the world as absolutely material, at the same time aiming to investigate the properties and behaviour of matter and reveal its directedness and self-transformation.

43 E. Fromm, To Have or To Be? (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 37–39.

44 Armenta, p. 16.

45 S. Oppermann, ‘From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency’, in Material Ecocriticism, ed. by S. Iovino and S. Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 21–36 (p. 21).

46 M. Gallagher, ‘Sound as Affect: Difference, Power and Spatiality’, Emotion, Space and Society, 20 (2016), 42–48 (p. 43).

47 Williams, pp. 247–48.

48 G. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 218.

49 B. Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique, 31 (1995), 83–109.

50 Bennett, p. 112.

51 F. Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, trans. by G. Ash (London: Verso, 2014), p. 61.

52 Bennett, p. 99.

53 W. Schrimshaw, ‘Non-cochlear Sound: On Affect and Exteriority’, in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, ed. by M. Thompson and I. Biddle (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 27–43 (p. 31).

54 J. Ash, ‘Technology and Affect: Towards a Theory of Inorganically Organised Objects’, Emotion, Space and Society, 14 (2015), 84–90 (p. 85).

55 Bennett, p. xiii.

56 K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Half-Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 151.

57 V. Despret and M. Meuret, ‘Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’, Environmental Humanities, 8.1 (2016), 24–36 (p. 35).

58 T. P. Kasulis, ‘Spirituality and Culture in Japanese Philosophy’, paper presented at the conference on Spirituality in Japan (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1992), p. 5.

59 Roberts, p. 134.

60 Macfarlane, ‘Foreword’, p. xiii.

61 Walton, pp. 11–13.

62 Armenta, p. 19. See also G. Strazzeri, ‘Il ciclo fecondazione-produzione-morte nella poesia di Antonia Pozzi’, Acme: Annali della Facoltà di Lettere, Università degli Studi di Milano, 48.2 (1994), 15–27; and G. Bernabò, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue: Antonia Pozzi e la sua poesia (Milan: Ancora, 2012).

63 Dalla Torre, ch. II. For the translation I followed Amy Newman’s lexical choices in her translation of ‘Dolomiti’ [‘The Dolomites’] appeared on The Ilanot Review: <http://www.ilanotreview.com/earth/poems-antonia-pozzi/> [accessed 2 November 2022].

64 Poems set in the mountains: ‘Mi ritrovo | nell’aria che si leva | puntuale al meriggio | e volge foglie e rami | alla montagna. || Potessero così | sollevarsi | i miei pensieri un poco ogni giorno’ (p, 166) [‘I find myself again | In the breeze that rises | Punctually at noon | And turns the leaves and the branches | Towards the mountain. || If only my thoughts | Could rise | A little every day’ (p, 167)]; p, 82–83; P, 48–49. Poems set in flatland: ‘Certe sere vorrei salire | sui campanili della pianura, | veder le grandi nuvole rosa | lente sull’orizzonte | come montagne intessute | di raggi’ (P, 52) [‘Some evenings I’d like to climb | up the bell towers in the plain, | to see the great pink clouds | slow on the horizon | like mountains interwoven | with rays’ (P, 53)]; P, 32–33.

65 P. P. Pasolini, Le Ceneri di Gramsci (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), p. 82; The Ashes of Gramsci, trans. by N. MacAfee (London: John Calder, 1984), p. 19.

66 E. Bell, ‘Into the Centre of Things: Poetic Travel Narratives in the Work of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd’, in Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work, ed. by R. Falconer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 126–34 (p. 127).

67 Translation by Amy Newman (see note 63).

68 Together with ‘Tramonto’ [‘Sunset’] and ‘Tristezza dei colchici’ [‘Sadness of the Autumn Crocus’], see also ‘Morte di una stagione’ [‘Death of a Season’].

69 G. Leopardi, Canti, ed. by N. Gallo and C. Garboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), p. 280; The Canti, trans. by J. G. Nichols (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 144.

70 Pozzi, L’età delle parole è finita, p. 271.

71 Williams, p. 251.

72 A. Comparini, Geocritica e poesia dell’esistenza (Milan: Mimesis, 2018), p. 152.

73 Suzuki, p. 24.