Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse

Front Cover
Sarah Maguire
Chatto & Windus, 2003 - 344 pages

This beautiful anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English, creating a rich bouquet of intriguing juxtapositions. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry.

There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South African, Seitlhamo Motsapi; but there are also sections devoted to more unusual plants such as the mandrake, the starapple and the tamarind.

An ex-gardener, the celebrated poet Sarah Maguire brings her extensive horticultural knowledge to bear on all the poems, arranging them into botanical families, identifying the plants being written about and writing a fascinating introduction. Whether you are a poetry lover, a gardener, a botanist, or simply the purchaser of the occasional bunch of flowers, this unique anthology allows you to luxuriate amidst the world's flora.

Other editions - View all

About the author (2003)

Sarah Maguire was born in London, England on March 26, 1957. She received a degree in English at the University of East Anglia. She was a poet and translator. Her collections of poetry included Spilt Milk, The Invisible Mender, and The Pomegranates of Kandahar. She also edited the anthology Flora Poetica. In 1996, she was the first writer to be sent by the British Council to Palestine. Once she returned to the United Kingdom, she began translating contemporary Arabic poetry. Sarah translated works by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, and the Afghan poet Naderi Partaw. In 2004, Maguire founded the Poetry Translation Centre at London University, which aims to introduce new audiences to leading poets from around the world. She died from breast cancer on November 2, 2017 at the age of 60.

Bibliographic information