Bleeding Green: War, Poetry and Ecology in Select Poems from Northeast India

Peter Nicholls’s essay ‘Wars I have Seen’ explores the mediation of war through the medium of poetry, visuals and technology, comments on its ramification and the alteration in the perception of war in the popular imagination. By extrapolating salient themes from the essay, specifically, the interrelation of visuality and violence and the adoption of poetry as the mode of creative expression and representation in a conflict-ridden landscape, this paper will reread poetry from the Northeast of India. Studies have undertaken an eco-critical reading of the poetry from the Northeast of India given the immersiveness of the poets in the ecosphere, while others have critiqued the representation of armed conflict in the region. Keeping this in mind, the current study would extend the ecocritical approach to include the effects, if any, of the militant clashes in the region on the biosphere and investigate its presence and representation in the poetry from the Northast.