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, and who died hiking in the Scottish mountains he loved, leaving his daughter their shared love of the natural world.

Destruction and care coexist throughout these poems, reflecting our human contradictions. “Storm Petrel” follows men living on an oil platform where “[n]oise jackhammered everyone’s eardrums,” and where “[a] favourite pastime is birding.” At the sighting of a corncrake, “all hundred and two men / raised their glasses of Kaliber.” When a bird “crash-land[s] […] flicking right and left in panic,” Reddick’s father comes to the rescue:

My father cradled the exhausted traveller,
lighter than the balsa glider he assembled
as a boy. He ran his fingers
along the wire-like struts of wing-bones,
checked the ruddering tail, the submarine keel-bone
and launched the storm-petrel
into an unsettled sky.

Reddick repeatedly reminds us that an individual’s survival, whether animal or human, is precarious. In “Man Survives Bushfire Hiding in a Pottery Kiln,” which takes its title from a CNN headline, the survivor “can transfigure cow bones and fruit-tree ash / into tea bowls and refectory dishes.” In the opening poem, “Muirburn,” the speaker returns her deceased father to earth:

My father weighed a little less than at birth.
I carried him in both hands to the pines
as October brought the burning season.
When I unscrewed the urn, bone-chaff and grit
streamed out. The smell of gunpowder.

Reddick, who is also author of the critical work Ted Hughes, Environmentalist and Ecopoet, captures the paradox of our unbreakable intimacy with this doomed planet through the wit of song and lament. “Superb Lyrebird” begins “I snatch the songs right out of their throats – throw / copied hoots at sleepy owls, squall and chortle.” The speaker goes on to imitate the sounds of “workmen’s whistling,” of chainsaws and fire alarms. By the end, the chatty lyrebird has been silenced:

Yesterday, the song dried in my throat in the forest.
Charcoal pillars. Mute ash. Ash hush.