The Storm’s Flora

“The Storm’s Flora is a collection concerned with time and place, shaped by a poet deeply attuned to her world: its plants, its weather systems, its traditions, and its griefs… This debut collection… instead carries the assurance, wisdom and generosity of a poet at home in her craft… This collection feels like a salve in a time of constant threat and uncertainty, pointing ever towards the staying power of human and extrahuman worlds.”

“The artichoke is a symbol of hope in many cultures. Stemming from its tender ‘heart’ which is protected by tough outer leaves, it represents resilience, inner beauty and the overcoming of hardship. These themes dovetail with Laura Wainwright’s poems which not only display their own inner beauty but also explore resilience in the natural world told through the landscape, language and history of her native Wales.”

“Taking her bearings from Louise Gluck and H.D., Laura Wainwright swiftly makes her own poetic territory from encounters with the natural world. She has a vivid observing eye and a singing sensibility. She evokes landscape in its varied modes while weaving-in history, legend, and memory. Richly attuned to nuances of light and weather, her poems are sensuous and have both haunting beauty and deep realisation. At times these are peopled landscapes, with figures either stepping forward or remaining in the background, but always bearing resonant witness. This collection has striking cohesion of purpose and imagery, and I highly recommend its compelling tenderness.”

“Laura Wainwright is at home in the shy places, her poetry has a sure touch, brimming with raw musicality, the language fresh, bodily and pleasingly dark.”

“Laura Wainwright’s poems quicken with blackbirds and dragonflies, meadowsweet and ragwort, gorse and wild orchids. They move at the rhythm of rivers and tides, tracing the pulse of the natural world and the human heart where memory, myth, and sensation meet. Each is a luminous encounter with place and being, alive with texture, colour, and sound, leaving the reader alert to the world as if for the first time.”

“The Storm’s Flora is a rich and mind-opening book. Laura Wainwright writes with inwardness and mystery, but always directly and with urgency, so that her voice seems to be coming at once from close by and from far away. These poems richly inhabit their histories and landscapes, and the book is a work of re-enchantment in and with the world not as it might be but as it is, now.”

“Laura Wainwright’s writing, painting and music come from the same source. Each art form nourishes the others. The Storm’s Flora combines a painter’s delicacy with the true poet’s scrutiny of language. The results are exquisite. Not a syllable wasted nor shading misjudged. Read here the work of a woman who has learned from her academic training to become one of the most exciting writers I know. And what a privilege to observe such blossoming.”

“Laura Wainwright’s debut is a veritable wildflower meadow bursting with poems that verge on songs and songs which flicker into poems, each one precise and alive with the scent of orchids, spearmint, lady’s bedstraw. By the end the reader doesn’t realise how enchanted they have become following this apothecary poet through forest and field to reach a place of distilled wisdom that the whole collection subtly builds towards. Here is a writer who would have me eat her ‘cawl carreg’ (stone soup) it has such a ring to it.”