
Burning Season
Yvonne Reddick(Author)
Bloodaxe Books Ltd (Publisher)
Published on 25. May 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-1-78037-645-5 (ISBN)
Description
Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature's defiance. Yvonne Reddick's understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad's gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father's death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak.
The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. It tells the story of a father who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported the entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddick's mother worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep below the ground. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season.
Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature's vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city.
Yvonne Reddick's first book-length collection builds on the achievement of her pamphlets Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate's Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books.
The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. It tells the story of a father who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported the entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddick's mother worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep below the ground. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season.
Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature's vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city.
Yvonne Reddick's first book-length collection builds on the achievement of her pamphlets Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate's Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books.
Reviews / Votes
'To have an ecological education, wrote Aldo Leopold, is to live alone in a world of wounds. Yvonne Reddick writes of the natural world in all its wonder, variety, and woundedness. Her poems are precise, beautiful, and clear-eyed acts of witness. They are also calls to action.' -- David Morley Elegiac, original and memorable, these poems uncover the private maps and ghost-bearings that guide us in the mountains, creating their own vivid geology. -- Helen Mort * on Translating Mountains * Reddick sets a sombre music behind the rawness of loss, like a glimpse of her mountains in the distance. * PN Review, on Translating Mountains * It's impossible to read this collection without being moved. * New Welsh Review, on Translating Mountains *More details
Edition
Paperback original
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
sewn/stitched
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
125 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-645-5 (9781780376455)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor, ecopoetry scholar and climber. She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Poetry Society's inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Northern Writers' Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian. The Poetry Review and The New Statesman, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC North West Tonight. She has published four pamphlets, including Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Women's Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate's Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books. Her first book-length collection, Burning Season, is published by Bloodaxe in May 2023. Her other publications include Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Magma: The Anthropocene Issue (as editor), which was met with the BBC news headline 'Poets print climate change poetry on recycled paper with vegetable oil ink.' She is also a book critic for The Times Literary Supplement.
Born in Glasgow in 1986, Yvonne Reddick grew up in Aberdeen, Kuwait City and South East England. She currently lives in Manchester. Her writing reflects the landscapes she has experienced, their environments, and the impacts of the oil industry on many of them.
Yvonne Reddick's research has revealed that Ted Hughes lobbied politicians about pollution, and that Seamus Heaney sold poems to raise funds for bog conservation. She has published climate change poetry by former oil geologists, and run nature writing workshops for organisations from Warwick Book Festival to the Ramblers. She holds a Readership in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire. Her latest work includes a nature writing project, Fire on Winter Hill, and presenting and writing the wildlife documentary Searching for Snow Hares, in collaboration with filmmaker Aleksander Domanski.
Born in Glasgow in 1986, Yvonne Reddick grew up in Aberdeen, Kuwait City and South East England. She currently lives in Manchester. Her writing reflects the landscapes she has experienced, their environments, and the impacts of the oil industry on many of them.
Yvonne Reddick's research has revealed that Ted Hughes lobbied politicians about pollution, and that Seamus Heaney sold poems to raise funds for bog conservation. She has published climate change poetry by former oil geologists, and run nature writing workshops for organisations from Warwick Book Festival to the Ramblers. She holds a Readership in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire. Her latest work includes a nature writing project, Fire on Winter Hill, and presenting and writing the wildlife documentary Searching for Snow Hares, in collaboration with filmmaker Aleksander Domanski.
Content
11 Muirburn
12 The Flower that Breaks Rocks
13 In Oils
16 He set off...
17 Esther in the Asylum Garden
18 The Gift
19 November
20 Fire-seed
22 The Frontier of Water
24 Madness Lake
25 Fired Earth
26 Superb Lyrebird
27 December
28 At the Corrie of the Birds
29 On the Alaskan Peak We Never Climbed
30 Loyal, Munro, Schiehallion...
31 Storm Petrel
36 January
37 Coal Measures
41 I watch the city through oil...
42 Frankincense
43 Cristaux de Roche
45 Translating Mountains from the Gaelic
46 Shadowtime
48 Of the Flesh
49 Spikenard
50 Firesetter
51 Kindling
52 February
53 Fossil Record
56 Ptarmigan
57 Rime
58 Hare at Hasling?eld
59 March
60 Imagines
62 Burning Season
64 Waterland
12 The Flower that Breaks Rocks
13 In Oils
16 He set off...
17 Esther in the Asylum Garden
18 The Gift
19 November
20 Fire-seed
22 The Frontier of Water
24 Madness Lake
25 Fired Earth
26 Superb Lyrebird
27 December
28 At the Corrie of the Birds
29 On the Alaskan Peak We Never Climbed
30 Loyal, Munro, Schiehallion...
31 Storm Petrel
36 January
37 Coal Measures
41 I watch the city through oil...
42 Frankincense
43 Cristaux de Roche
45 Translating Mountains from the Gaelic
46 Shadowtime
48 Of the Flesh
49 Spikenard
50 Firesetter
51 Kindling
52 February
53 Fossil Record
56 Ptarmigan
57 Rime
58 Hare at Hasling?eld
59 March
60 Imagines
62 Burning Season
64 Waterland