Tormentil

'I can't face the big stuff so I comb the moors for a tiny yellow flower' – so begins Tormentil, the second poetry collection by Ian Humphreys. Set largely in the starkly beautiful West Yorkshire moorlands, these poems creep and bloom across geographies and time. Isolated by grief in the first months of the pandemic, Humphreys goes in search of hope and blessings among the burnt heather, tumbledown mills and canal locks near his home in the Calder Valley. He unearths a landscape of wildflowers and wildlife, a soundscape of rain and birdsong, at once healing, threatening and under threat.
These are richly textured poems of living and resisting, anchored by connections to family, food, community – and an acknowledgement of the precarious root-holds of hard-won freedoms. A soaring, defiant hymn to recovery, this vital book contemplates migration, otherness, and all the internal and external elements that bind us, make us unique.

Ian Humphreys' debut poetry collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press) was nominated for the Portico Prize. His second collection, Tormentil won a Royal Society of Literature 'Literature Matters' Award while in progress. He is the editor of Why I Write Poetry and the producer and co-editor of After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath, both published by Nine Arches Press. In 2023, Ian was appointed Writer in Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. He is widely published in journals and anthologies, and has written for the BBC. Ian is a fellow of The Complete Works.