The Grassling
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
£10.99
Mr B's review
Elizabeth’s writing is sensory, elastic and dreamlike. In short chapters, she visits the Devonshire landscape through her own physical immersion and her family’s nature-entwined oral history.
When her father’s health declined and she found herself torn between hospital and home, care and fear, the outdoors was where the past and present could merge. In the fields, she could still share the world with her father, bringing him wildflowers to his bedside and revisiting the connection he had with the land.
Her questioning and research reveal years of change: in land ownership, place names, agricultural practices and our human relationship with the natural world.
This is the book to read when you are craving the sensation of lying in a summer’s field. Imagine the dust and pollen settling on your skin and the smell of plant life tinting your world a shade of green. – Katrina
Description
‘Deliciously tactile and meditative . . . to read this is to luxuriate in the land, and to connect to it and oneself’ Bernardine Evaristo
What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing.
Spurred on by her father’s declining health and inspired by the history he once wrote of his small Devon village, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett delves through layers of memory, language and natural history to tell a powerful story of how the land shapes us and speaks to us. The Grassling is a book about roots: what it means to belong when the soil beneath our feet is constantly shifting, when the people and places that nurtured us are slipping away.
Publisher Review
This astonishingly beautiful ode to the sights, sounds and smells of the countryside . . . [evokes] a richly immersive sense of the natural world and our place within it. * Country Living * A poetic, lyrical tribute to the earth beneath our feet . . . Burnett is one of the freshest voices in the current crop of nature writers * Countryfile * With a blend of poetry, memoir and a uniquely experimental, sensory style of nature writing, The Grassling celebrates the lusciousness of both land and language … Ideas that might in a lesser writer have seemed whimsical are grounded by the rich layers of Burnett’s prose. * TLS *
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