Muirburn
My father weighed a little less than at birth.I carried him in both hands to the pinesas October brought the burning season. When I unscrewed the urn, bone-chaff and gritstreamed out. The smell of gunpowder. I remembered the sulphur hiss of the match —how he taught me to breathe on the steeple of logsuntil the kindling caught and flames quickened.That night, in sleep, I saw the forest clearingby the moor’s edge, and the ring of his ashes. A skirl of smoke began to rise —bracken curling, a fume of blaeberry leaves. Ants broke their ranks, scattering, fleeing, and a moth spun ahead of the fire-wind. I took the path over the heath at a run. A voice at my shoulder said, 'You’ll inherit fire.'And through the smoke I glimpsed a line of figures on the hillside, beating and beating the heather as the fire-front roared towards them. A volley of shouts: 'Keep the wind at your back!'My grandmother threshing with a fire-broom, Dad hacking a firebreak. My stillborn brother, now grown, sprinting for the hollow where the spring once flowed, the whole hill flaring in the updraft. And there: a girl, running for the riverside —she wore my face, the shade of ash.
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- December 27, 2023
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Yvonne Redick, Burning Season (Bloodaxe Books, 2023)
Copyright © 2023 by Yvonne Reddick.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Yvonne Reddick is a writer and researcher. Her debut collection Burning Season, published by Bloodaxe, won the Laurel Prize for Best UK First Collection of Ecopoetry. Her pamphlet Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017) won the Mslexia Magazine Pamphlet Competition and was selected as a favourite pamphlet of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. Her work appears in publications such as The Guardian, PN Review and The North. She has received Northern Writers’ Awards for memoir and poetry, a Hawthornden Fellowship and a place on the 2017-18 Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme. Her books Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Anthropocene Poetry are published by Palgrave Macmillan. With the wildlife filmmaker Aleksander Domanski, she made the film Searching for Snow Hares, shortlisted for the BMC’s Women in Adventure film awards.
"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, on Burning Season
"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), on Burning Season
"Yvonne Reddick's poetry engages with survival on a burning planet, climate loss and nature's defiance ... In her work she explores a deep love of mountains and nature, encouraged from a young age by her petroleum engineer father."—The Scotsman, Poem of the Week
"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, on Burning Season
"I find myself most transported by Reddick’s more tightly controlled poems. For me it is in these that she shows her superb skills of observation."—Tamsin Hopkins, The Alchemy Spoon
"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
"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 USA
"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
"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
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