The Thermobaric Playground by Mark Haworth-Booth

​"This gorgeous collection shows Mark Haworth-Booth at his musical, affectionate, generous best. Its project is a sort of poetic homing, earthed in the North Devon hedgerows. Many of the poems are prayerfully and whimsically observant of the lives of birds, from the swifts shrieking through a Cretan cave to the loveliness and absurdity of domesticated chickens. These are, however, poems with an edge; there are excoriating indictments of environmental damage, both local and global, and fury at the greed driving the sixth extinction, as well as poems bearing witness to the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, and Haworth-Booth’s own arrest.  Most of all, though, there is beauty, and love. Wonderfully attentive to sound and song, these poems are bursting with exquisite visual detail – all the gorgeous “delicate, fugitive colour[s]” of our world captured with an artist’s eye. A final curation of affectionate portraits confirms Haworth-Booth as a kind and curious observer of the human world; artists and artworks are lovingly recalled, there are wry and tender love-songs for both wife and grumpy cat. Perhaps most poignant of all is the self-portrait that peeps out from a poem about his father’s letters, a small bereaved boy at school determinedly keeping a stiff upper lip... I would not be without this book. Haworth-Booth’s world is ripe with human and animal wonder, humour and love. It is a world I wish to live in; it is a world worth saving."
— Fiona Benson

"A bright, beautiful, brimming, rattlebag of styles and subjects’"
​— Mark Cocker