Hiraeth Press

Hiraeth Press is a pub­lisher with a mis­sion. Poetry is the lan­guage of the Earth—not just poems but the slow flap of a heron’s wings across the sky, the light­ning of its beak hunting in the shallow water; autumn leaves and the smooth course of water over stones and gravel. These, as much as poems, com­mu­ni­cate the being and meaning of things. Our pub­li­ca­tions are all poetry, whether they are poems or non­fic­tion, and reflect the ideal that falling in love with the Earth is nothing short of rev­o­lu­tionary and that through our rela­tion­ship to wild nature we can birth a more enlight­ened vision of life for the future. We are pas­sionate about poetry as a means of returning the human voice to the poly­phonic chorus of the wild. We pub­lish a wide range of books that deal with our rela­tion­ship to the Earth and the revi­tal­iza­tion of an eco­log­i­cally viable spir­i­tu­ality fit for the plan­e­tary era. Although we spe­cialize in poetry we also pro­duce non-fiction books as well, such as the award win­ning The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality by Jason Kirkey and the Courting the Wild series edited by Jamie K. Reaser. The Welsh word hiraeth encap­su­lates the spirit by which we strive and that the books we pub­lish hope to inspire. A direct trans­la­tion of the word might be some­thing like “intense longing to belong,” though a more lit­erary reading and a look at its role in medieval Welsh poetry reveals that it is a deep longing of the soul for one’s orig­inal home­land. Here at Hiraeth Press we believe that our col­lec­tive human home­land are the still-wild places of the Earth. We long for a more eco­log­i­cally and spir­i­tu­ally sane world and believe pas­sion­ately that poetry is a form of activism on behalf of the more-than-human world.

Country of Publication

United States