Vulnerability and the child in the Anthropocene: David Wheatley's Child Ballad (2023)

ABSTRACT David Wheatley’s Child Ballad (2023) bears witness to the mutual vulnerabilities of his family and the environment, demonstrating a relational ontology between them. With a sense of urgency and importance, communicated by its focus on the vulnerable child, the collection depicts a migratory model of habitation across the archipelago of Ireland and Scotland. This challenges the false exceptionalism of nation-centred and self-centred thinking, about global poetry in the Anthropocene. Drawing on Judith Butler’s writings on precarity and ethical response, this essay argues that two key private experiences of vulnerability decentre Wheatley’s subject positions in Child Ballad 1) becoming a parent, with its attendant responsibilities for the vulnerable child in light of their separate autonomies, and 2) a heightened self-awareness of vulnerability, in the world and in language – shaped by the lived experience of migration and the late discovery of dyspraxia. This network of vulnerable relations leads to a combined climate-parent anxiety that yields a child-centred poetic, finding hope in the infinite mystery and limitless potential of the child.