Harriet Tarlo sees nature, in Maggie O'Sullivan's poetry, ‘moving from its position as resource or thing in order to become an agent in the production of knowledge’ (Tarlo, 2007, 2). The idea of nature as knowledge converges with the ‘radical landscape’ poetry with which Tarlo has been closely associated and that she has done much to define. The radicalism of this poetry involves what Tarlo describes as a mingled sense of exposure and genre: ‘writing outside is also being in it, being aware of where it is … the inter-linking elements … to carry on your back the history of the sublime, beautiful and close-your-eyes-to-all-therest aspect of pastoral’ (Johnson, 2000, 386). Genre is re-energised by re-exposure to what it seeks to contain. Radical landscape poetry tends to use more dynamic open forms or styles of writing. Tarlo argues that

Radical landscape poetry also involves a Cagean belief that we can learn from nature's manner of operation. We can learn that nature is not chaotic.

Carol Watts speaks to this directly in the first section of Wrack (2007). Looking at the shore, the speaker thinks ‘there must be a key / in the writing of barnacles where fibonacci / makes sense of the spread of bladderwrack’ (Watts, 2007, 7). This echoes a much older poem, Tom Raworth's ‘Tracking (Notes)’ (1973), in which ‘fibonacci numbers’ are offered as one solution to the fact that ‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work’ (Raworth, 1988, 89, 91). Watts continues with this abiding interest in Zeta Landscapes, which explores land by the River Vyrnwy in Powys via ‘a different harmonics: the language of an imaginary zeta (Riemann) landscape’, derived from Bernard Riemann's work on prime numbers (Watts, 2009–2010, 26).