Ecopoetry and the Making of a World in Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Selected Poems from Peter Wuteh Vakunta’s Green Rape; Poetry for the Environment

Abstract

Environmental issues arising from growing tensions in human-non-human interactions are now global and remain a core focus for sustainability. Urgent awareness and activism from all angles, including research and literature, are needed. Ecopoetry is a form of environmental literature that seeks to contribute to the fight for global environmental sustainability through poetic techniques. This paper examines how selected ecopoems from Peter Wuteh Vakunta’s (2008) Green Rape, Poetry for the Environment, demonstrate the theme of ecological crisis. It explores Vakunta’s ecopoetry as a representation of our ecological realities and a political tool of resistance that challenges institutional and cultural actions that destroy the planet. This qualitative study uses an exploratory research design and close reading to collect data from six poetic units that highlight environmental concerns. The analysis examines words, sentences, lines, stanzas, and entire poems through qualitative content analysis. Its conceptual framework combines ecocriticism with Skinner’s (2005) tropological and entropological ecopoetics. The study found that through ecomimetic strategies such as mirroring real-world settings and landscapes, interrupting pastoral and utopian narrative arguments, and foregrounding individual environmental concerns, Vakunta’s ecopoetry gives considerable attention to the world’s ecological crisis. It also reveals that through diction, imagery, tone, and personification, the ecopoems become textual places that illuminate the realities of degradation, disorder, and decay that push the ecosphere into highly undesirable and potentially irreversible outcomes. The study concludes that ecological poetry, such as Green Rape, Poetry for the Environment, is an aesthetic expression that serves as a powerful medium for environmental education and advocacy.