Tag Archive for: wind

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Helm | Sarah Hall

 

 

Non-human protagonists are having quite a moment in fiction: Laline’s Paull’s The Bees and Pod, and Polly Clark’s Tiger are just two recent examples of narratives in which animals take centre-stage. But in Helm, Sarah Hall goes a step further in articulating the more-than-human world by giving voice and agency to Britain’s only named wind, the Helm of the title – to dazzling effect. Spanning the Neolithic to the Anthropocene, the wind blows through the landscapes of a panoply of human lives to evoke the tragic trajectory of humankind’s decreasing bond with the natural world. Yet despite the urgency of her subject-matter, Hall remains a deft and often humorous storyteller, and the novel is as much a love-letter to the natural world as an obituary of it.

 

Gilberto and the Wind | Marie Hall Ets

Gilberto and the Wind - Marie Hall Ets

Gilberto can’t see his best friend. But he feels him near. His best friend is the wind. This charming book — grounded by Ets’ colorful, minimalist drawings — introduces kids to the unseen world around them. It was originally published in 1963 and remains a whimsical introduction to a nuanced relationship with nature.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for children here.

This is a Picture of Wind | JR Carpenter

This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered south west England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon.

Following the news in the months after these storms, writer and artist J.R. Carpenter was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only perceive indirectly through its affect. The poems that ensued are gathered in this book, accompanied by an introduction by Johanna Drucker, and a poetic afterword by Vahni Capildeo.

Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, ​This is a Picture of Wind attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.