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Burning Season

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Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection, Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is...
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  • 08 August 2023
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Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection, 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. The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season

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. 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.

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Price: $16.95
Pages: 80
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: 08 August 2023
Trim Size: 9.25 X 6.25 in
ISBN: 9781780376455
Format: Paperback
BISACs: POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Nature, POETRY / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, POETRY / Women Authors, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Places
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‘Oil and fire run through Scotland-born Yvonne Reddick’s debut, Burning Season, an ecopoetical elegy for a father who worked oil platforms of the North Sea and oil fields across the Middle East ... Reddick captures the paradox of our unbreakable intimacy with this doomed planet through the wit of song and lament.’ - Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Reviews, Poetry Foundation

‘This collection is born of deep feeling and scientific knowledge. Powerful, beautiful poetry in itself, it will also illuminate discussions on the environment and climate change.’ – Frank Startup, The School Librarian

"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

‘It’s impossible to read this collection without being moved.’ – New Welsh Review

‘This is a beautifully structured pamphlet that offers the reader a deeply felt sufficiency’  WriteOutLoud

‘This first book-length collection from Reddick is as lyrical as it is defiant. A collection that confronts climate change, a world in flames and societies on the verge of collapse, told through an exploration of family history.  This is an incredible exploration of the oil industry.’ – Mairi Oliver of Lighthouse Bookshop, The Bookseller (Scottish books preview)

‘Yvonne Reddick’s much-anticipated Burning Season is a lyrical and personal collection that tackles challenging ecological questions in dextrous and elegantly crafted poems.’ – Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North, New Writing North

‘Reddick takes the deeply personal and maps out a geography of grief, for both father and planet: near and elusive as a hare, distant and huge as an oil rig. Loss illuminates loss, reminding us exactly what it is that we, and our descendants, stand to lose in the face of climate crisis.'  Ellora Sutton, Mslexia

'The poetry about our burning planet is always artfully executed with a documentary authority about the crisis as it engulfs the planet. Alongside these serious poems are those heartfelt recollections about Yvonne Reddick’s father, who died in a hiking accident. This makes for a tender, intelligent, tricksy yet polemic collection which I greatly enjoyed reading.’ – Daljit Nagra, Poetry Extra (Book of the Month)

Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor and ecopoetry scholar. She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Poetry Society’s inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Northern Writer’s Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian Review, Poetry Review and the New Statesman, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC North West Tonight. She is also a book critic for The Times Literary Supplement. She now lives in Manchester.
    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 Haslingfield
    59     March
    60     Imagines
    62     Burning Season
    64     Waterland