Overview

Mock Orange is a collection of poems in which Anne Osbourn attempts to order her life and her origins and to try to understand how and why she became a scientist, specifically a plant biologist. From early childhood she has tried to make sense of the world through plants. In mid-eighteenth century Sweden Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, spent his life trying to understand his Maker through the classification of plants. Osbourn's poetry encompasses Linnaeus's adventures and experiences and his fascination with living things. Mock Orange is therefore about journeys from origins, both personal and global, in which negotiations between scientific and non-scientific languages and points of view form a central theme.

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9781916226326

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Many of the poems in Mock Orange are quite light in tone, with wit a more frequent driver than profundity. That's a hugely desirable quality for it's too rarely found in contemporary poetry, which often takes itself too seriously. An unusually wide variety of forms and approaches are adopted in this collection, creating a rather eclectic voice, which includes the prose poem, the found poem and unusual formats. In Mock Orange, it's clear that Osbourn aims to push boundaries and, in doing so, offer a very varied poetic experience. Whether serious or light, whether unusual or conventional in form, these poems are always very well crafted, whilst the poet is not content with mere cleverness, but perfectly able to achieve quite affecting emotional impacts, too. - Noel Williams These poems fuse a plant biologist's and a poet's sense of wonder. Her lens is particularly clear, the observations acute and the imagination fully alive. A distinctive and necessary collection from Anne Osbourn. - Moniza Alvi Osbourn combines playful intelligence with a scientist's eye for precision in language and image. Her acute observations of the natural world inform her explorations of our desire to find our place(s) within it. In poems about heritage, landscape, language and scientific history, she by turns entertains, informs, expands and focuses our attention. - Heidi Williamson These poems made even this curmudgeon smile. And reflect. - Professor Sir David Baulcombe FRS

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