Reading the Flowers

These poems are sensuous, disciplined, earthy and deeply knowledgeable — a knowledge worn close to the skin. Musical and exceptionally eloquent, they glow. The journey of Reading the Flowers brought me almost unimaginably close to the wonders conveyed: "As near to kin as you'll ever be" ('Through the Turnstile Gate').

Reading the Flowers is a book to read and reread. By sticking to her subject — not just the flowers of the title but also trees and grass, insects and birds, and humans who interact with them — Linda France has created a collection of poems as various, as extraordinary and as marvellous as the creations of nature it celebrates. It is a work of scholarship, imagination and precise observation: learned, sexy, witty, personal and moving. The poems are as perfect as poems can be: their language rich and seductive and exquisitely judged. They sing in the way poems should.