Jean Betrays Memory
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Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger
Robert Chandler
Robert Chandler on why The Years of Anger by Randall Swingler is the best book of 1946.
Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821
Elvia Wilk
‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.
Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet
Daisy Lafarge
‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’
Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.
Best Book of 1924: The Beggar
Bill Manhire
‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’
Interview
Daisy Lafarge
‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.
A Bleed of Blue
Amy Key
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
The Want
Cyrus Simonoff
‘It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it.’
On Diane di Prima
Iris Cushing
‘Sex flowed into art, art flowed into livelihood, livelihood flowed into poetry, poetry flowed into friendship, friendship flowed into sex. The entirety of this life was sacred.’
The Lye of the Land
Derek Gow
‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’
In Conversation
Ruth Padel & Ilya Kaminsky
‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’
Ways of Knowing
Lauren Wallach
‘Maybe I was born with this face the way moths are born with the ability to blend in with bark, to survive.’
Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin
Robert Becker
‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’
Scapegoat
Katharine Quarmby
‘In 2000 the Disability Rights Commission was founded, to push for equal rights for disabled people. It had a major job on its hands, listening to and acting on individual cases – access, transport, discrimination – and getting the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act onto the statute book.’
Introduction
Isabella Tree
‘Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.’
Shifting Baselines
Callum Roberts
‘Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to older people.’
The Ard, the Ant and the Anthropocene
Charles Massy
‘I had somehow compartmentalised my mind: nature and my farm landscape stood either side of a deep chasm.’
Holding Up the Sky
Rod Mason & Charles Massy
‘Fire, wind, rain. We’re gonna meet all them three one day, all together, fire, wind and rain, all together one day very soon if we don’t do something about what’s happened and happening.’
Third Eclogue of the Vegetable Garden
John Kinsella
‘What you don’t know set / against all you want to know’
Symbiotic Rootscapes
Merlin Sheldrake
‘Symbiosis – the intimate association formed between different species – is a fundamental feature of life and enables new biological possibilities. Mycorrhizal fungi are some of the more striking examples.’
Water Is Never Lonely
Judith D. Schwartz
‘This water isn’t irredeemably lost, after all. It has merely been waiting for companionship.’
Survivors
Adam Weymouth
‘Salmon are the ultimate survivor. They’ve survived ice ages and cataclysms. But are they going to survive humans? It’s dubious, isn’t it?’
Creep
Caoilinn Hughes
‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’
The Secret Loves of Flowers
Dino J. Martins
‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Of the Forest
Manari Ushigua & Zoë Tryon
‘We Indigenous peoples know how nature works, how water, mountains, trees function and relate to each other, how stars in space are connected with the earth.’
Vultures
Samanth Subramanian
‘The death of the vulture is also the death of how we cope with death itself.’
Oh Latitudo
Amy Leach
‘The supervolcano has a supersecret underneath the surface, magma and hot mushy crystals.’
The Wolf at the Door
Cal Flyn
‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’
