The Wetlands

By Richard Arterton

The Wetlands is a powerful, far-reaching collection of poems that moves through grief, love, landscape, and the quiet, often brutal truths of contemporary life. Set against backdrops as varied as the Galloway hills, Amsterdam's canals, and the intimate rooms of memory, Richard Arterton blends lyric tenderness with stark observation to create a book that feels both mythic and sharply modern.

Across these poems, nature becomes witness and companion: burns swell to rage, forests hold their silence like a verdict, and rowan trees guard the remnants of old stories. Ordinary moments - a pigeon trapped in a chimney, a shared loaf by the water, a child's laughter, a stumble on a jetty - are transformed into symbols of loss, reconciliation, and the fragile work of beginning again.

Arterton writes with an eye for the sacred in the everyday, weaving personal history with echoes of legend, conflict, and political upheaval. From the intimate ache of broken trust to the vast moral weight of global violence, these poems stand at the intersection of the personal and the public, asking what we owe to each other and to the land itself.

At once haunting and hopeful, The Wetlands is a testament to endurance, the way love endures, landscapes endure, and stories endure, even in the face of storms. This is a collection for readers who seek poetry that is lush yet uncompromising, tender yet unafraid to confront the wounds beneath the surface.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GTHSKMGQ
• ISBN13: 9798251033052
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"