Yvonne Reddick’s poems in Deep Mountain are love-letters to mountains and their animals, plants and people. Her book is an ecopoetic celebration of hills and high places. It pays attention to their beauty as the climate emergency wreaks irreversible change.
Deep Mountain shows us intimate connections with the living world, and lifelong friendships (and bitter feuds) among hikers, climbers and mountaineers. Mountain hares, moorland owls, and the last wolf in England inhabit the collection’s environments. A fictitious mountaineer knocks back whisky in the Alpine Bar, brooding on the time he cut the rope of the woman he loved. A woman falls in love with the moody moors and dramatic outcrops of the Peak District after her climbing partner leaves her. Dizzy with altitude and awkwardness, a man kneels in the Alpine snow to propose to his girlfriend.
Yvonne Reddick honours the memory of a climbing friend who died in the Andes, and her beloved father returns as a Brocken spectre. The poems show how climbers navigate trust and danger, intimacy and betrayal, environmental exploitation and protection. They also draw upon her deep family connection to mountains and mountain culture. Her six-times-great-grandfather collected crystals from Vesuvius and Alpine passes. Her father shared his love of hillwalking with her, before his untimely death in the Highlands.
There are love-letters to iconic landscapes, including Kinder Scout with its history of right to roam movements, Ben Nevis with its crows that steal hikers’ snacks, and the Breithorn with its fragile glaciers, celebrate care and connection, while acknowledging that even mountains are vulnerable to human activity.
Deep Mountain is Yvonne Reddick’s second book-length collection, and builds on the success of her debut Burning Season (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), which won the 2023 Laurel Prize Best UK First Collection, was shortlisted for the Association for Literature and the Environment UK and Ireland prize, and was a finalist for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award. It expands the ambitions of Translating Mountains, which won the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Some of the poems in Deep Mountain were commissioned by the Laurel Prize for Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and written for the British Academy’s Being Human Festival of the Humanities.
Praise for Burning Season:
‘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
'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 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
'Burning Season is Yvonne Reddick’s debut, and it’s a vivid collection of poems that focus on the natural world and climate change. Burning Season also offers a very personal exploration of how natural forces, shape human life, death, and experience. At the heart of this collection is the loss of a father, explored through images of the natural world.' – Maria Taylor, Under the Radar
'... once she’s up and running, Reddick is outstanding, with poems like 'Firesetter' giving free rein to her imagination, and the collection’s title poem distilling all the poet’s concerns into something powerful and affecting.But it’s the long closing poem, 'Waterland', that was perhaps the highlight of this fine collection. Here all Reddick’s strengths are on show, including a subtle musicality that you realise she has deployed sparingly throughout, so as to enhance its effect...' – Matt Merritt, Magma, on Burning Season
‘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
Yvonne Reddick reads from Burning Season at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Yvonne Reddick reads five poems from Burning Season: 'The Flower that Breaks Rocks', 'The Gift', 'Burning Season', 'Ptarmigan', 'Rime' and 'Waterland'.
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