Florilegium (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781848617025)

Molly Vogel's first collection of poems, Florilegium is an exploration of life written in 'the language of flowers'. The poems regard flowers as both symbols and means of communication; in a broader sense, they deem the natural world essential to our understanding of words, ourselves, and the divine. Like Coleridge's rook in 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison', the flower is a sign that connects those disparately placed, both geographically and emotionally. Florilegium finds its blooms in Scotland as well as California; in free verse as well as stricter form; in books as well as dreams; on streets and at shrines as well as in wild gardens. Fittingly, the poems are varied and vividly colourful, inviting and surprising. They precede a long-form glossary, a meditation growing out from the poems' words but also from the entire history of literature and thought around flowers. Though intertwined with the poems, the glossary is a collection in itself: in equal parts literary criticism, philosophical treatise, and prose poem.