Ecocritical Readings of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry: Land, Environment, and Identity in the North Central Zone

This study conducts an ecocritical analysis of contemporary poetry emerging from the North Central geopolitical zone of Nigeria, examining how poets from Plateau, Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger, and Kwara States represent the relationships between land, environment, and cultural identity in their literary work. Ecocriticism has developed a rich body of theory for reading literature's engagement with the natural world, but its application to the specifically Nigerian North Central context, where land use conflicts between farmers and herders, deforestation, and artisanal mining are pressing ecological and social challenges, offers a new and locally urgent contribution to the field. The study analyses a corpus of 60 poems by 15 North Central Nigerian poets published between 2018 and 2023, drawn from published collections, literary journals, and validated online platforms. Analytical frameworks draw on African ecocriticism, political ecology, and the ethics of place in literary studies. The study examines how poets construct and defend specific North Central ecosystems, including the Jos Plateau grasslands, the Benue River basin, and the Middle Belt savanna, as culturally significant and ecologically threatened places. Findings reveal a dominant elegiac mode in which landscape loss is figured as cultural bereavement, and an emerging counter-discourse of ecological activism that draws on traditional land custodianship ethics. The study argues that North Central Nigerian poetry constitutes a significant body of environmental literature that merits inclusion in both ecocritical scholarship and environmental advocacy contexts. Keywords: ecocriticism, North Central Nigeria, contemporary poetry, land identity, environmental literature.