Twelve Words for Moss

Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn . . . Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains its own irrepressible light.

In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett celebrates the unsung hero of the plant world with a unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir.

Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to County Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy and luminous beauty of these overlooked places. She also takes strength from them as she recovers from her grief at her father's death. As she meditates on and renames her favourite species of moss, she finds a healing power in language, and draws inspiration from the resilience and tenacity of her plant - and human - friends.

Praise:

"Twelve Words for Moss is a fascinating, subtle and risk-taking book; its remarkable opening pages in particular dis-orient and re-orient the reader, readying us for the forms of attention-giving to the overlooked and undersung world of mosses which the rest of the book beautifully practices. Poetry, descriptive-evocative prose, memory, memoir, natural history and more all drift and mingle in strikingly new ways in Burnett's book, down at the "boundary layer" where this ancient, modest life flourishes so generatively" - Robert Macfarlane

"Exquisite, luminous and quietly radical ... so electric and so alive. It makes the world more beautiful and dimensional and vibrant - or moreso, it shows the world as it is to our moss-blind, weary eyes with a prose style that is utterly unique and refreshing ... I loved it" - Lucy Jones

"This accomplished writer's prose - filled with figurative and tactile imagery - and interspersed poetry powerfully join the human body, mind, and spirit with the Earth" - The Countryman

"A masterclass in the art of prose writing, and my favourite nonfiction book in a very long time" - Sharon Blackie, author of If Women Rose Rooted

"Hybridity (of form, subject) is what makes Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's work sing, beguile. Part poet, prose nature writer and woodland psychogeographer, her voice is her own" - Sinéad Gleeson, Author of Constellations: Reflections From Life