From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life-as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and creatures around her: the son who must get back on the horse that just bucked him off, the husband who gives great gifts, the animals whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as family. Auker understands those who live in the sway of nature's moods far off the main roads, and she commends them to us in luminous prose backlit by her own hard-earned experience.

Throughout the twentieth-century artists have responded to the landscape in emotional, physical and political ways: exploring themes of belonging to the land by interrogating the relationship between landscape history and identity, the enclosure or militarisation of land, to artists creating works that harness or dramatise natural earth processes. As the custodian of the national collection of British art, Tate's climate emergency declaration points to a wider concern and care for the environment that underpins the themes in Radical Landscapes. Structured on three broad thematic sections; 'Trespass', 'Landscape and Identity', and 'Climate Breakdown', there will be around 100 works in total starting from 1900 until today. Focussing on activism and how we value, care for, use and draw meaning from the natural landscape, the book will showcase an array of viewpoints reflecting the diverse perspectives in modern Britain, examining the artists' relationship to the landscape and social history as a stimulus for the imagination as much as action and protest. It presents a radical and outward-facing image of Britain and its diverse peoples and landscapes to the world. These conversations present a rare opportunity to reframe Tate's holdings of landscape art as well as explore how we might commune with nature and collectively work towards a more sustainable and equitable future. Artists include Henry Moore, Peter Kennard, Tacita Dean, Ingrid Pollard, Jeremy Deller, Rose English, Chris Killip, Derek Jarman, Yuri Patterson, Anthea Hamilton and many more.

The first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic. Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism. After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.

This book is the first collection to feature histories of women in Western Esotericism while also highlighting women's scholarship. In addition to providing a critical examination of important and under researched figures in the history of Western Esotericism, these fifteen essays also contribute to current debates in the study of esotericism about the very nature of the field itself. The chapters are divided into four thematic sections that address current topics in the study of esotericism: race and othering, femininity, power and leadership and embodiment. This collection not only adds important voices to the story of Western Esotericism, it hopes to change the way the story is told.

The winter Bride wears diamonds. To those down below, she appears to be sleeping, locked inside a chastity belt of cold. She naps lightly behind the veil of ice and snow, letting it shield her from the sun and throw it back into the sky. But her chill is only skin deep. Inside her hidden folds and caves and recesses, the heartbeat of her lives and breathes and curls around the seeds of what willbe. The winter Bride is pregnant, gestating the future, smiling quietly at the snores of the bears and the mountain lions, allowing all of the fertile places to swell and burgeon with the life that is to come. The winter Bride is holding a flood in deposit for the sun's withdrawal in spring. This is the canvas on which Amy Hale Auker paints the lives of her characters. Shiney, the ranch owner; Monte, the foreman; Rafe, the old hand; Jody, the new hand; Blake and Brenna, who can't seem to grow up even though they have a houseful of children. These, and many more, are waiting to show you how they live, love, work, and play in the shadow of the Bride. Auker's writing is extraordinary, as evidenced by these reviews of her award-winning Rightful Place: "Her focus is sharp and discerning, intimate and clear - so refreshing that her writing transcends the contemporary cattle-culture and her harsh Texas landscape to become a template for creating a richer life." John Dofflemyer, author of Poems from Dry Creek "Auker is fiercely connected - and will connect you as well - with the most elemental spirits of the earth and the heart." Margo Metegrano, Director of The Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry Winter of Beauty is a novel by Amy Hale Auker, winner of the 2012 WILLA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, which will bring joy to your heart and tears to your eyes. Her words come from the heart and will melt you, just like the sun melts the snow on Bride Mountain. A working cowgirl, Auker writes and thrives on a ranch in Arizona where she is having a love affair with rock, mountains, pinon and juniper forests, the weather, and her songwriter husband, who is foreman of the ranch. As Amy says, "For years I cooked for cowboys, cleaned up after cowboys, listened to cowboys tell stories, but for the past five years I have done my own time in the saddle. And I write. Always I write." She guides her readers to a place where the bats fly, lizards do pushups on the rocks, bears leave barefoot prints in the dirt. Where hummingbirds do rain dances in August, spiders weave for their food, and poetry is in the chrysalis and the cocoon. Winter of Beauty will please the adult reader who enjoys the apt description of people and things; the understanding of nature, human or otherwise; and becoming immersed in them through a turn of phrase that brings both clarity of thought and joy in the reading."

The thirteenth volume in this acclaimed paperback series includes articles on Cornish emigration, Cornish literature, the novelist Virginia Woolf, the poet Jack Clemo, Cornish mining history, Cornish folklore, the medieval Cornish-language miracle plays, and William Scawen: the seventeenth-century Cornish patriot and language revivalist.

Contributions by
Michael Bender, Amy Hale, Alan M. Kent, Cynthia Lane, Gary Magge, Paul Manning, Philip Payton, Sharron P. Schwartz, Matthew Spriggs, Andrew C. Symons, Andrew Thompson and Malcolm Williams

The eighth volume in the acclaimed paperback series . . . the only county series that can legitimately claim to represent the past and present of a nation.

Contributions by
Lynn Abrams, Katherine Bradley, Graham Busby, Paul Cockerham, Treve Crago, Bernard Deacon, Amy Hale, Zoe Hambly, Dorothy Mindenhall, Philip Payton, Ronald Perry, Sharron P. Schwartz, Garry Tregidga and Simon Trezise

The primary aim of New Directions in Celtic Studies is to focus on contemporary issues and to promote interdisciplinary approaches within the subject. Written by international scholars and practitioners in fields such as folklore, ethnomusicology, art history, religious studies, tourism and education, the book brings together in one volume a wide range of perspectives. It responds to the recent questioning of the viability of the notion of 'Celticity' and the idea of Celtic Studies as a discipline and points to a renewed vitality in the subject. New Directions in Celtic Studies is divided into four sections: popular culture and representation; commodities and Celtic lifestyles; contemporary Celtic identity and the Celtic diaspora; Celtic praxis.