Tag Archive for: wilderness

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The Savage Landscape | Cal Flyn

 

A modern  journey into the heart of what we call wilderness, The Savage Landscape weaves together adventure, philosophy and personal reflection, asking urgent questions about humanity’s relationship with the natural world and the meaning of wild places in an era when no corner of the planet remains untouched. Flyn’s lyrical prose carries readers from the ocean floor to volcanic peaks, blending awe-inspiring landscapes with deep historical and cultural insights.

What makes this book exceptional is its refusal to romanticise wilderness. Instead, Flyn confronts the complexities of how humans have shaped—and been shaped by—the wild, challenging readers to reconsider their own relationship with the untamed. The result is a work that is as intellectually stimulating as it is beautifully written, leaving you with a sharper understanding of the wild’s enduring, if complicated, hold on the human spirit.

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The New Wilderness | Diane Cook

 

In this haunting debut novel, Diane Cook explores a tense, often disturbing mother-daughter relationship against the backdrop of a world devastated by pollution, climate catastrophe, and overpopulation. Bea and her daughter Agnes are part of an experimental government study that allows a small group of volunteers to live in the untouched Wilderness State. Here the nomads must follow strict “Leave No Trace” rules enforced by the Rangers who oversee them. But the fragile community, marked by in-fighting, loyalties, and betrayals, is under constant threat, confronting both Bea and Agnes with the same wrenching choice—fight for the land they’ve come to love, or surrender their fragile freedom for the promise of survival elsewhere. A gripping drama of motherhood, nature, and humanity’s place in a fragile, endangered world.

 

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.

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

 

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