ECOLITERATURE
In 2011, Two Ravens Press refocused its list to concentrate solely on ecoliterature. As you'll see at the bottom of the page, we have four titles coming up in 2012 that clearly fall into this category: two volumes of ecopoetry and two nonfiction titles. However, there are a number of titles from our backlist that also fall into the 'ecoliterature' category, and we'd like to draw your attention to those books. If you click on the titles, you'll be taken to the webpage for that book, which will provide you with additional information and the chance to order.
Please also visit the website for EarthLines, a beautiful new quarterly full-colour A4 magazine dedicated to writing about nature, place and the environment.
NONFICTION
A Wilder Vein, edited by Linda Cracknell, foreword by Robert Macfarlane
An anthology of new literary non-fiction that focuses on the relationship between people and the wild places of Britain and Ireland.
Outside, by Chris McCully
A series of essays and reflections about seaweeds, about freshwater mussels, about winter starlight, geese, wigeon, small boys catching frogs and exiled Irish noblemen. About forgotten cloisters, coats-of-arms; about ice; about subtlety and owl holes in barns ... And above all, about displacement, loneliness, and about ‘not fitting in’ – about being Outside.
Blazing Paddles, by Brian Wilson
An 1800-mile odyssey by kayak, around Scotland’s grand cliffscapes, unspoiled shorelines, fearsome sea passages and Hebridean islands. The narrative is brim-full of history and folklore, disasters at sea, haunted bothies and the exploits of Celtic Saints, Viking raiders and mermaids. It is also a perceptive commentary on submarines, supertankers, and other issues threatening the Scottish coastline and its unique and fragile wildlife.
Dances With Waves, by Brian Wilson
A 1200-mile journey by kayak around the coast of Ireland, complete with diversions into sea-lore, local legend, music and history.
To the Islands, by Steven Mithen
The personal memoir of archaeologist Steven Mithen’s twenty-five-year quest to uncover the world of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Hebridean islands – and his defence of archaeology as a lifelong passion.
FICTION
The Long Delirious Burning Blue, by Sharon Blackie
From the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert to the misty flow of a north-west Highland sea-loch, this novel presents us with landscape in all its transformative power. An honest and moving exploration of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, The Long Delirious Burning Blue is above all a story of courage, endurance, and redemption.
'Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story.' The Independent on Sunday
The Last Bear, by Mandy Haggith
A haunting and compelling novel set one thousand years ago in the remote northwest Highlands of Scotland, The Last Bear recounts a tale of ecological and spiritual crisis from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Who killed the last bear in Scotland, and with what consequences?
POETRY
Parsimony, by David Troupes
Small Expectations, by Donald S Murray
The Two Sides of the Pass, by Maoilios Caimbeul and Mark O Goodwin
The Atlantic Forest, by George Gunn
In the Hanging Valley, by Yvonne Gray
Castings, by Mandy Haggith
Forthcoming in 2012
2012 will also see the launch of our new A4 full-colour magazine, EarthLines, dedicated to writing about nature, place and the environment. For more details, see the EarthLines website.
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Poetry
THE SIMPLE MEN by David Troupes (author of Parsimony, published by Two Ravens Press in 2009)
Published April 1; 9781906120603; £9.99. Our price £7.99
For more information, please click on the book cover.
The Simple Men is the second full collection of poetry from David Troupes, an American poet living in West Yorkshire. He applies an assured, eccentric craftsmanship to innovative forms and ambitious insights. The poems of The Simple Men range over hills and down rivers, through truck stop diners and wedding parties, renewing at every turn our relationship with land, love and the self.
‘The Simple Men, David Troupes’ second collection, is a real gem: a gritty, lyrical hymn to the conjunction of nature and humanity. He has the sharp eye of the artist and sees through to the essence of things in vivid, stunningly spare images. He brings us up so close to the world in all its hardness and beauty that we almost feel its breath. But there is no room for complacency or sentimentality in his work – this is real nature – nature described in all its wonderful complexity and stubbornness. As he puts it himself, this is ‘no place for phony conjurings’. The ‘Simple Men’ sequence, which runs through the collection, leavens it with a celebratory, spiritual core that is starkly optimistic. Troupes has an engaging ability to find beauty equally portioned in backwoods or roadside diner. The carefulness and intelligence of his writing ensures this is a collection to treasure.’ John Glenday
Praise for Parsimony:
'A poetry of watchfulness, of immersion in wilderness and commune with the wild, David Troupes’ fine début is marked by an intensely focused inquisitiveness, delineating landscapes, shifting seasons and their creatures in a meticulous, sparing style, all filtered through a wonderfully lyrical sensibility.’ Robert Alan Jamieson
‘If “parsimony” is often equated with meanness, David Troupes reclaims its virtues – “praiseworthy economy in the use of means to pursue an end”, as my dictionary puts it. That’s a good description of Troupes’ poetic method – a sparingness with words that takes him to the heart of things. While there are moments of discovery, joy and celebration, this is no paradise – too many storms, droughts, predators and depressions – and any consolations are hard-won. What warmth there is, is created by the living beings themselves, and one of Troupes’ most striking images is that of the skunk cabbage, with its deep contractile roots and the ability to thaw frosts. Many poems are addressed to another, an intimate, creating a sense of solidarity both in and against the world. There is also a sense, properly veiled, of the sacred – a sense of wonder, and mystery too, for these poems don’t instantly yield their meanings. Formally confident, Troupes can pull off both conventional rhymes and unconventional line-breaks, and execute the most startling of shifts with his deft similes.’ Ken Cockburn
'Evokes a powerful sense of landscape ... These are spare, sharply focused poems written with great sssurance and control and an often miraculous clarity ... The abiding impression is of poise and sensitivity informed by a searching intelligence. An impressive new voice.'
AC Clarke, The Edinburgh Review
David Troupes grew up in Massachusetts, holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Edinburgh, and now lives with his wife in West Yorkshire. His first book of poems, Parsimony, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2009, and his other work includes the online comic Buttercup Festival, publications from Knucker Press, critical work on Ted Hughes, and collaborations with illustrator Laurie Hastings and composer Joel Rust. When he’s not writing, drawing or working, he’s walking.
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ENTANGLEMENTS: An Anthology of Ecopoetry
Edited by David Knowles and Sharon Blackie
Scheduled for November 2012; ISBN 9781906120658
Introduction by Dr. David Borthwick, University of Glasgow
Nonfiction
THE CARBON CYCLE by Kate Rawles
Scheduled for August 1 2012; ISBN 9781906120634
In 2006, 'outdoor philosopher' Kate Rawles cycled 4553 miles from Texas to Alaska, following the spine of the Rocky Mountains as closely as possible. Cycling across unforgiving but starkly beautiful landscapes – New Mexican deserts, over high mountain passes, across glaciers, and down to the sea – she encountered bears, wolves, moose, cliff-swallows, aspens, and a single, astonishing lynx. Along the way, she talked to Americans about climate change – from truck drivers to the Mayor of Albuquerque – to find out what they knew about it, whether they cared, and if they did, what they thought they could do. Kate's story of the trip, in which she not only deals with the rigours of the journey (cycling for ten hours a day in temperatures often in excess of 100F, fighting punctures, endless repairs, inescapable grinding fatigue ...) but does constant battle with her own ideas and assumptions, helps us to cross the great divide between where we are on climate change, and where we need to be. Can we tackle climate change while still keeping our modern Western lifestyles intact? Should we put biofuel in the camper vans and RVs? Or do we need much deeper shifts in lifestyles, values and worldviews?
'A wonderfully rich and insightful narrative ... an extraordinarily revealing series of vignettes. Kate's work-a-day belief that the principal purpose of philosophy is “to question the assumptions of our age” keeps even her most abstract reflections grounded in an admirable way. ' Jonathon Porritt
Kate Rawles studied philosophy at Aberdeen University, and environmental philosophy at Glasgow and Colorado State University. She was an indoor philosophy lecturer for nearly a decade before escaping to work freelance in 2000. Kate now works half-time as a lecturer in Outdoor Studies at the University of Cumbria – teaching environmental issues – and half-time as a freelance outdoor philosopher, writer, lecturer and campaigner. She is passionate about the need to find urgent, effective and suitably radical responses to our multiple environmental challenges (including giving our values and worldviews a thorough overhaul) – and firmly believes our quality of life can go up rather than down in the process. Kate is a keen hill-walker and sea-kayaker (with a particular love of remote islands with lots of wildlife) as well as a long-distance cyclist. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and sits on the Food Ethics Council. She lives in Cumbria with her partner, Chris.
More information about Kate, the Carbon Cycle and Outdoor Philosophy can be found at www.outdoorphilosophy.co.uk
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52 FLOWERS THAT SHOOK MY WORLD – A Radical Return to Earth by Charlotte Du Cann
Scheduled for August 1 2012; ISBN 9781906120641
The story of an inquiry, a sea change, a path of flowers, a return journey
In 1991 Charlotte Du Cann leaves a fashionable London life and goes on the road. Her decision to break free has been influenced by the appearance of a flower, known as Mexican wormseed. Later she begins an exploration into the language of plants that changes her direction – and the territory she travels through – completely. The plants come dreams, in visions, in medicine ways and myths, in the lives of writers and in writing, and as she follows their track, crossing the thorny deserts of Arizona and the flowering wastelands of England, they call her back to the heartland, back to the shore where the sea-kale grows, to restore a world where nature and beauty are at the centre of life, and, most of all, to return to herself, someone who loved to be light and at liberty, an independent female being at home on the earth. From the Oxford Botanical Gardens to the streets of Mexico City, from encounters with power plants and people, with history and ancestral trees, this is the story of search for a reconnection with nature and human liberation that speaks urgently of the future.
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer and community activist and works in conmmunications for the grassroots organisations, Transition Network and the Dark Mountain Project. She was born in London in 1956 and worked during the 80s as a lifestyle journalist, specialising in food, fashion and design. After travelling for ten years mostly in the Americas, she settled in Suffolk in 2002 to write a sequence of books about reconnecting with the earth. She has published ten works of non-fiction, ranging from a collection of essays about food, Offal and the New Brutalism (Heinemann) to the travelogue, Reality Is the Bug That Bit Me in the Galapagos (Flamingo). She edits several collaborative blogs, This Low Carbon Life, The Social Reporters Project and the OneWorldColumn, and is currently working on a low-carbon cookbook, One Planet Community Kitchen and a prequel to 52 Flowers, The Earth Dreaming Bank.
You can find a selection of her writings on http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com.
