Context - Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass

• The poem 'Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass' was written by Simon Armitage
• Simon Armitage is one of the UK's most popular contemporary poets - He was born in Yorkshire in 1963 and began writing poetry at a young age
• Simon Armitage is the current serving Poet Laureate of England, having taken over from Carol Ann Duffy - This is a ceremonial role, the original responsibility being to compose poems on significant occasions - Nowadays, the Laureate tends to focus on furthering poetry's audience, particularly within an educational context
• This poem's tale of one man's violent efforts to dominate nature might be read as an allegory of the way that humanity and nature interact more generally
• When Armitage published this poem in 2002, the troubled relationship between human beings and their environment was becoming a prominent and serious political issue
• More and more scientists and politicians were raising the alarm about the dangers of climate change; for instance, Al Gore's important documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' (which explained the science of global warming and called for political action against it) would appear only a few years after Armitage's book
• Armitage has been open about his belief that poetry should address the climate crisis (among other major contemporary issues)
• This poem's tongue-in-cheek portrait of a man trying to bend even a part of nature so small as his own garden to his will might thus be read as a serious reminder of humanity's ultimate weakness
• When people think they can shape or exploit the natural world for their own purposes, this poem suggests, they're only fooling themselves: nature wins out every time, with consequences that might range from humiliation to extinction for foolhardy humanity