When Miriam Waddington writes of the exhaustion of language, that inevitable subject for poets, she speaks first of the lost language of nature…. But for Waddington the sense of a lost language is only momentary. She turns again and again to writing of the ineffable wind, and of whatever grows, in a language "light / and quick" through which she makes it possible, in the words of another poem, for "trees [to] yield up their wordless therapy."

Waddington declared this direction for her poetry in her first book, Green World (1945). Its title poem, later called "Green world one," is a good place to begin because it focusses on a subject—the green world—which defines Waddington's outlook, because it uses a metaphor—the growth of a plant—central to her vision, and because, more generally, it shows her ability to build a poem both rhythmically and aurally beautiful, and...