Burning Season

Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor, ecopoetry scholar and climber. She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Poetry Society’s inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Northern Writers' Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian. The Poetry Review and The New Statesman, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC North West Tonight. She has published four pamphlets, including Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Women's Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’s Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books. Her first book-length collection, Burning Season, is published by Bloodaxe in May 2023. Her other publications include Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Magma: The Anthropocene Issue (as editor), which was met with the BBC news headline ‘Poets print climate change poetry on recycled paper with vegetable oil ink.’ She is also a book critic for The Times Literary Supplement.Born in Glasgow in 1986, Yvonne Reddick grew up in Aberdeen, Kuwait City and South East England. She currently lives in Manchester. Her writing reflects the landscapes she has experienced, their environments, and the impacts of the oil industry on many of them.Yvonne Reddick’s research has revealed that Ted Hughes lobbied politicians about pollution, and that Seamus Heaney sold poems to raise funds for bog conservation. She has published climate change poetry by former oil geologists, and run nature writing workshops for organisations from Warwick Book Festival to the Ramblers. She holds a Readership in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire. Her latest work includes a nature writing project, Fire on Winter Hill, and presenting and writing the wildlife documentary Searching for Snow Hares, in collaboration with filmmaker Aleksander Domanski.

'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.'

• 11 Muirburn12 The Flower that Breaks Rocks13 In Oils16 He set off…17 Esther in the Asylum Garden18 The Gift19 November20 Fire-seed22 The Frontier of Water24 Madness Lake25 Fired Earth26 Superb Lyrebird27 December28 At the Corrie of the Birds29 On the Alaskan Peak We Never Climbed30 Loyal, Munro, Schiehallion…31 Storm Petrel36 January37 Coal Measures41 I watch the city through oil…42 Frankincense43 Cristaux de Roche45 Translating Mountains from the Gaelic46 Shadowtime48 Of the Flesh49 Spikenard50 Firesetter51 Kindling52 February53 Fossil Record56 Ptarmigan57 Rime58 Hare at Haslingfield59 March60 Imagines62 Burning Season64 Waterland