The novelist Max Porter recommends three books: The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, Living With Trees by Robin Walter and Notes from Deep Time by Helen Gordon.
Max Porter is the author of The Death of Francis Bacon, praised as ‘a miniature masterpiece’, and ‘a feat of empathy, imagination and literary brio’. His Sunday Times bestseller Lanny was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the 2019 Wainwright Prize. His first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year and the International Dylan Thomas Prize.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shamanby Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert
The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon.
A revelatory and passionate cosmo-ecological life story. He is a really extraordinary human, and this book is a more truthful account of environmental devastation than many of our more compromised attempts here in the ‘merchandise’ societies. It’s a book like no other.
Living With Trees by Robin Walter
Trees and woods offer great potential for rebuilding our wider relationship with nature, reinforcing local identity and sustaining wildlife.
I’d really like to ask some kindly philanthropist to buy a copy of this book for every household in the UK. Very important, beautifully produced, a bible of Common Ground’s research and ongoing progressive intent as regards wood, forestry, biodiversity and trees as community in this country.
Notes from Deep Time by Helen Gordon
The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it’s there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation.
Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative. Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world’s most dangerous volcanic complexes in Naples.
At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn’t quite as it seems.
A terrific book, especially clarifying on the Anthropocene in context. I loved the especially eye-opening last chapter on the deep future, on the disposal of nuclear waste and the human failing to think and plan beyond the individual lifespan. Sobering and instructive time travel.
POETRY
Poem of the Month
The English Summer | Holly Hopkins
Dun-coloured endangered species of specialist interest;
best found on grungy paths, behind gabardines,
near shoes on school radiators, wet socks at work.
A furred creature, hood-hidden, brolly-blinded, shy.
The invasive species: a fearsome firestorm
of peeled blue sky. Allelopathic leaf-crisper,
river-fading grass-bleacher, ice-cream smiling
skin-killer, furze-burning-forest-eater, agricide.
See the burn-blisters on the ridge of this ear.
See water rationing. See heat oedema. See dizziness.
Holly Hopkins grew up in Berkshire, grew up even more in London and now lives in Manchester. Holly’s first collection The English Summer (Penned in the Margins) is shortlisted for the Forward Prizes’ Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation.
Looking for something you can’t find here? Contact our Librarian if you’re looking for something specific, or an educational book list to support teaching about climate change:
mattroselibrary@gmail.com.