Mark Haworth-Booth

​Mark Haworth-Booth was born in Yorkshire in 1944 and grew up in Sussex. He studied English Literature at Cambridge University and Fine Art at Edinburgh University and worked as a curator at the Manchester Art Gallery (1969-70) then the Victoria and Albert Museum (1970-2004), and has published books on graphic design and photography. He and his wife have lived in North Devon since 2009. They are both active members of the Green Party and Extinction Rebellion. His verse has appeared in national magazines since the 1980s and he featured in 'New Voices' at the South Bank Centre in 1992.
The Thermabaric Playground presents Haworth-Booth’s poems in four overlapping sections:
​(i) ‘Habitat’ in which the poems introduce the Devon countryside where the author lives; (ii) ‘The Headlined World’, in which he widens his focus to include the impact on nature of human activity; (iii) ‘For the birds’ celebrates birds, wild and domesticated, that live alongside us; and in (iv) ‘Presences’ he portrays people and the arts they create in the human environment.

THE THERMOBARIC PLAYGROUND by Mark Haworth-Booth

​This is Mark Haworth-Booth’s second solo collection of poems. His first collection was Wild Track (2005). A selection of North Devon poems appeared in Tessa Traeger’s album of photographs Wild is the Wind (limited edition, 2017).

Praise for The Thermobaric Playground:

​"This gorgeous collection shows Mark Haworth-Booth at his musical, affectionate, generous best. Its project is a sort of poetic homing, earthed in the North Devon hedgerows. Many of the poems are prayerfully and whimsically observant of the lives of birds, from the swifts shrieking through a Cretan cave to the loveliness and absurdity of domesticated chickens. These are, however, poems with an edge; there are excoriating indictments of environmental damage, both local and global, and fury at the greed driving the sixth extinction, as well as poems bearing witness to the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, and Haworth-Booth’s own arrest.  Most of all, though, there is beauty, and love. Wonderfully attentive to sound and song, these poems are bursting with exquisite visual detail – all the gorgeous “delicate, fugitive colour[s]” of our world captured with an artist’s eye. A final curation of affectionate portraits confirms Haworth-Booth as a kind and curious observer of the human world; artists and artworks are lovingly recalled, there are wry and tender love-songs for both wife and grumpy cat. Perhaps most poignant of all is the self-portrait that peeps out from a poem about his father’s letters, a small bereaved boy at school determinedly keeping a stiff upper lip... I would not be without this book. Haworth-Booth’s world is ripe with human and animal wonder, humour and love. It is a world I wish to live in; it is a world worth saving."
— Fiona Benson

"A bright, beautiful, brimming, rattlebag of styles and subjects’"
​— Mark Cocker

"Here is a voice that speaks to us honestly, poetically, of the world about us, that is enlightening and always deeply engaging." 
— Michael Morpurgo

The Thermobaric Playground by Mark Haworth-Booth (ISBN 978-1-913329-82-2) is published by Dempsey & Windle under their VOLE Books imprint
on 1st October 2022. .ISBN 978-1-913329-82-2
perfect-bound paperback, 120 pages, RRP £12.50
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