Diana Woodcock

Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty

Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty is a collection of poetry that catalogues the Arabian Desert’s critically endangered, disappearing flora while promoting caretaking of the earth. Living for two decades at the edge of the Arabian Desert, poet Diana Woodcock became interested in local and global conservation issues, as well as in the environmental ethic of the Qur’an. In anticipation of the opening of Qatar’s UNESCO-sponsored Qur’anic Botanic Garden—the purpose of which is to maintain for scientific and educational purposes a living collection of Qatar’s 270-plus indigenous plants and to showcase the 52 mentioned more than once in the Qur’an—the author began writing poems that feature the ecology and flora of the region, which is in the throes of a major environmental calamity. Reverent Flora inspires a greater appreciation of and commitment to protecting not only the unique environment of the Arabian Peninsula, but also other equally endangered ecosystems around the world.

Praise

"The elements of the desert are each, like William Blake's 'grain of sand in Lambeth,' a visionary commentary and a prophetic disclosure of Creation in its severe, abundant Fact. In Reverent Flora, Diana Woodcock amplifies this severe abundance into a new form, a new sacrament of praise. And this praise is in itself prophetic, and in itself a greater love. Here is a book of radiant attentions."

—Donald Revell, author of Canandaigua and Drought-Adapted Vine

"The plants of Diana Woodcock’s Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty are sometimes defined by science, often act as spiritual instruments, and usually offer health and nutrition. But they are always heroic and vibrant, and they somehow manage to sidestep the categories human culture assigns them. "Plant presence" here confronts life on its own terms: "spiny-tipped / and prickly-toothed," "steadfastly noble," or "imposing / and elegant." It only makes sense that, through verbal music and careful description, the reader is exhorted to be more like the jointfirs ("neither / to destroy nor dominate") or to "feel fire flashing / through every calyx tube, and letting go / of the terror, dare to act." The often austere beauty of Arabian flora sustains those pilgrims who will shed "superfluous stuff" when entering the "desert’s heart" and seek out teachers who can be both humble and proud. Here’s "a toast," then, to Diana Woodcock and to the moonseeds and jujube and "the smallest blossom opening / briefly … / to take us all the way to heaven."

—Cara Chamberlain, author of The Divine Botany and To Gaze Upon Their Loveliness

"The poems in Diana Woodcock’s Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanic Bounty achieve something remarkable: They make the desert bloom. In reading them, I was irresistibly reminded of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” as they led me “To See a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” With the sensibility of a Romantic poet and the precision of a scientist, Woodcock examines the surprising richness of the desert’s plant life, weaving the region’s language, religion, literature, and culture into its climate and geography.  From “The Gardener’s Dream in the Desert,” in which she traces her own history of associating gardening with profusion, in other locales, to her growing appreciation of the subtlety and delicacy of growing life in arid soil, to her “Desert Ecology” pieces, each inhabiting and illuminating a particular plant, to her exploration of “The Twenty-two Most Mentioned Plants in the Quran,” Woodcock’s meticulous attention to detail breathes imaginative life into the land and its cultivation."

—Diane Burton, Associate Editor, Nimrod International Journal

"Just as we appreciate precision in poetic language in general, Off the Coast values technical language that flows seamlessly in content and syntax. Diana Woodcock’s  chapbook Desert Ecology elevated the discourse and celebrated both subject and context simultaneously. Now we are happy to see Reverent Flora, a full-length collection that includes several poems published in Off the Coast. From our perspective, we can’t have too many science poems in response to a non-scientific political age. Buy a copy and place it where people will pick it up and read it."

—Valerie Lawson and Michael Brown, editors of Off the Coast and publishers of Resolute Bear Press

---