Search results for ""Author Elizabeth-Jane Burnett""

Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel PrizePlunge into mountain lakes and drift along meandering rivers in Swims, the debut poetry collection by Elizabeth-Jane BurnettA long poem taking many forms, Swims begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales: from urban pond to open sea. The poet swims among fishermen on Grasmere, reimagines the body as bottle cap in the Channel, and clambers down the bank of the river Ouse with words scrawled on her swimsuit.As political as they are personal, these meditations are conceived as environmental acts that probe the relationship between landscape, memory and the self. A sinuous, innovative debut, Swims reminds us of the power of swimming to transform the human spirit, registering what the water gives to us and what it takes away.

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A remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna. Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. 'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.' - Rebecca Tamas

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2023 for Nature Writing''Exquisite, luminous and quietly radical . . . utterly unique and refreshing'' Lucy JonesWhere nothing grows, moss is the spark that triggers new life. Embarking on a journey though landscape, memory and recovery, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett explores this mysterious, ancient marvel of the plant world, meditating on and renaming her favourite mosses from Glowflake to Little Loss and drawing inspiration from place, people and language itself. ''Fascinating, subtle and risk-taking . . . Poetry, descriptive-evocative prose, memory, memoir, natural history and more all drift and mingle in strikingly new ways'' Robert Macfarlane

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'Deliciously tactile and meditative . . . to read this is to luxuriate in the land, and to connect to it and oneself' Bernardine Evaristo What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing.Spurred on by her father's declining health and inspired by the history he once wrote of his small Devon village, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett delves through layers of memory, language and natural history to tell a powerful story of how the land shapes us and speaks to us. The Grassling is a book about roots: what it means to belong when the soil beneath our feet is constantly shifting, when the people and places that nurtured us are slipping away.

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