OCCASIONS FOR SCARCITY: FROM ECOLOGY TOWARDS THEOLOGY BY WAY OF POETRY

This article begins with an examination of the contested term 'scarcity', tracing it through its signal presence in economics, then mutating within ecology, eventually appearing on the margins of theology. If poetry is to offer some degree of mediation, the article considers what would be the basis of an appropriate poetics, one which must be derived from the underlying material basis of composition, but by which poems can 'think'. Finally, the article considers whether there is any way in which poems might 'pray' out of their own ontological limitations, but decides, through a consideration of one of the author's own poems, that poetry does not strictly do so, except indirectly by revoicing within its own dynamic field the word 'prayer' itself.