- Saying it with Flowers £9.99 inc. UK pp
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Release date: April 2013
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Saying It With Flowers
In his latest collection, Peter Phillips covers themes from the serious and thoughtful to the humorous and elegiac. He imagines the strange lives of flowers, their human dimensions, and his connections with them. Among the many floral voices explored, a Buttercup from the flower meadow is a wide-boy tax evader, Ukraine Sunflowers are crushed with grief, and a Hibiscus becomes sexually aroused.
He similarly writes about birds, animals, his natural and human worlds, ending with a series of climate change poems and an essay titled 'Inspiration, or where I get my ideas from'.
From reviews of Four Poems from Saying it with Flowers (Hearing Eye)
Phillips buries bullets (if not land mines). They lie in the text like
his snowdrops who didn't see daylight for years and like Glück's
Wild Iris who return from oblivion to find a voice.
Joan Michelson, London Grip and Acumen
This mini pamphlet... collectively
constitutes an object lesson in Saying it with Flowers.
Jeremy Page, The Frogmore Papers
...a small objet d'art, its metaphors reminiscent of Jon
Silkin's Flower Poems (1965).
Peter Lawson, The Jewish Chronicle