The Tide Will Take It

This collection of poems is both celebration and elegy, paying homage to the everyday beauty of the natural world and documenting and protesting its degradation and neglect. The poems move through distinct threads: poems of ocean and river; poems that draw insight from or give voice to birds and animals; and poems that tell or retell the experiences of real or mythical women. Activist though they are, the poems in this collection avoid the didactic register. They speak instead through many voices: news reports, bird song, other poets, even the tide itself, with an urgency, tenderness and optimism.

‘The poems in The Tide Will Take It do more than just describe the world: instead they give shape to a way of being that combines an awareness of the transitoriness of the moment with a lived appreciation of the much longer cycles of human life and the natural world. At once intimate and immense in its implication, it is a remarkable achievement.’ - James Bradley