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.

"Molly Vogel’s book is both timeless and modern in its botanical obsession, its sensuous knowing, and its generous form. The variegated poems of the first half are love cries breaking from a thoroughly embodied spirit. Here, too, is a mind petalled and pollinated with culture and horticulture from California to Caledonia, Greece to Japan: ‘blue pomegranate / halved in the night you are still / spilling stars’. The reflective prose of the second half is sure to delight any reader who simply loves plants, or who wants to go deeper into the dissection of our global traditions of artfully living with the natural world. This is a deliriously gorgeous gathering and making."
— Vahni Capildeo