Tag Archive for: wilderness

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The Knucklebone Floor | Linda France

The Knucklebone Floor is partly a verse biography of Susan Davidson (1796–1877), who spent thirty years landscaping and developing the grounds of Allen Banks in Northumberland, including woodland, paths, rustic bridges and a summer house with a knucklebone floor. It is also a book about boundaries and wilderness, fragility and resilience, flora and fauna, people and places, then and now, women and men, the human world and the natural world. Richly and formally inventive, it offers a collective perspective of history, identity and ecology at a time of global fragmentation and ecological crisis.

Cover image: Matilda Bevan, Study of a Stream, Allen Banks (2018)

Source: Smokestack Books

Earth Dwellers | Kristen Lang

The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch in the Earth’s history defined by human impact? With its immersion in powerful wilderness landscapes, Earth Dwellers challenges our human-centredness by embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that go back millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us.

Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. And asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome, a place where consumption is a relationship and not a right. This is ecopoetry – where the natural world is primary, and humans have to find their place in it, rather than the other way around.

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The Wall | Marlen Haushofer

‘The air trembled, gold and green and clear, at the edges of the forest.’ A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.

‘Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling.’ Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

 

See more from Penguin Vintage Earth