In this article I attempt to show the Ao-Nagas’ experience of living in the hills under pre-industrial and industrial systems as represented in the poems of Temsula Ao, an award-winning poet from Nagaland, India. Ao represents the pre-industrial cultural landscape as peaceful, simple, and harmonious and uses the devices of idealization, nostalgia, and return and retreat, and represents the industrial cultural landscape as discordant and as constituting a struggle for survival. I argue that the powerful critical tool of post-pastoral reveals the dynamic ecopoetics in Ao’s poems.