Plant Collector

The Plant Collector is inspired by a year in the life of the author’s garden. The genus of the flora and psychological fauna proffer up a soul classification and act as a catalyst for metaphysical discourse, hermetic inquiry and spirited contemplation. We are transported on a sage journey through the cycle of the seasons. The plants are submariners, the flowers astronauts, and the lawn a green ocean subjected to the executioner’s blade; Jack Frost leaves behind glass sculptures, the iris has a curious beard, the astilbe is a Deutschland princess, and geraniums are starving hoboes; foxgloves are seductive saxophones for addicted bees, veronica is a miraculous bull, and baleful hostas channel Van Gogh’s madness. It is a beguilingly wondrous collection of emblematically imbued narratives and idiomatic parables. The language owes much to Robert Frost and the Symbolists, and is as versatile and responsive to the elemental as the plants and flowers are to the elements. Earthed in Nature’s red teeth and claws, danger and joy, fortitude and fragility, life and death, fertilize these intimate and meditative universal poems.