Becoming Wetland – Yvonne Baker
ISBN: 9781788641975
£7.99
As the global ecological crises deepens, fire and water, elements that bring warmth, life, become increasingly threatening as we hold our breath, the earth burning and drowning. In Becoming Wetland Yvonne Baker dives into the existential menace of a world whose waters have lost rhythm and balance. But we are never in the realm of the didactic. This watery world is one of sorrow and questions, of images so precise and clear we feel them as our own. With her gift for making connections, between heart and world, between events and objects that could go unnoticed and the ripples of their impact, Yvonne Baker skilfully takes us ‘into the waters / of the reedbed as it sinks into darkness’ where we find the lost objects of ordinary, inundated lives. And in a central sequence we move forward through time, looking back on ourselves through the eyes of those still to be born to find, ‘a reminder of the years when we still had hope.’ But back in the present, that hope has not failed, if only we will listen and accept the blessing on those of us, all of us, ‘caught / between the ochre heat, the black rain.’
Timely, poignant and beautiful, from a poet whose writing warns, comforts and invites us to feel deeply.
Author biography
Yvonne Baker is married with three sons and five grandchildren. She worked for many years as a teacher in primary education, and later as a headteacher and religious education adviser. She has been published in print and on-line magazines and placed in competitions. Her poems have been included in Second Light, Paper Swans, Emma Press and Poetry Space anthologies. She belongs to several poetry groups: Chichester Stanza, Taking Your Work Further, Kith Poets and Second Light Network, all of which offer support and friendship.Her poetry explores the relationship between the outer and inner experience and how this can reveal hidden emotions and feelings. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Tree Light, was a winner in the Cinnamon Pamphlet Prize 2022 and her debut collection, Love Haunts in Shades of Blue, won the Cinnamon Literature Prize and was winner of the 2025 Rubery Book Award, poetry category. Her second full length collection was Backwards, Forwards Across the Sea. followed by Light Still, Light Turning.