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Burning Season
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08 August 2023

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.
‘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)
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