Description
Book SynopsisBurning 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.
Trade Review'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 *
Table of Contents11 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 Haslingfield 59 March 60 Imagines 62 Burning Season 64 Waterland
