Burning Season

Burning Season is a book about fire, survival, climate change, and nature's defiance, written by Yvonne Reddick. It combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history, celebrating nature's vibrant resilience. Reddick's father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 72 pages
Publication date: 25 May 2023
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Burning Season is a captivating book that delves into the profound themes of fire, survival, climate change, and nature's defiant resilience. Author Yvonne Reddicks brings a unique perspective to these topics, as her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. Through her writing, Reddicks explores the paradoxical nature of her father's gift—his love for nature and mountain landscapes—in the context of climate change. The collection includes a series of vivid, moving, and heartfelt poems that delve into Reddicks' grief after her father's tragic death in a hiking accident. These poems are set against a broader backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak, highlighting the interconnectedness of human actions and the devastating impact of climate change on the natural world.

Burning Season seamlessly combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. The book tells the story of Reddicks' father, who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported his entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddicks' mother, on the other hand, worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep beneath the ground. This family narrative forms the foundation of Burning Season, interweaving with the celebration of nature's vibrant resilience. The poems showcase the author's deep connection with the natural world, from planting oak saplings to spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter and imagining life in an underwater city.

Yvonne Reddicks' first book-length collection builds on the remarkable achievements of her previous pamphlets, Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), which won the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureates Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books. Burning Season showcases Reddicks' poetic prowess and her ability to convey complex emotions and ideas with clarity and beauty. Through her writing, Reddicks invites readers to reflect on the intersection of personal and societal challenges, urging us to embrace our connections with nature and work towards a more sustainable and resilient future.

Weight: 152g
Dimension: 231 x 156 x 8 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781780376455