Winner of the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award: a debut that finds what grows back on damaged ground.

Orchids come up on the scrubland by Uskmouth power station. The Usk swim at Newport was abandoned in 1938 because the river was too dirty to race in. A stretch of contaminated land by the motorway has been turned into playing fields and covered in graffiti. These are the places Laura Wainwright’s first collection goes, and it looks at them as closely as it looks at a lavender bed or a song thrush in an allotment.

Wainwright is a poet, academic, artist and musician, and the poems draw on all four. Welsh flower names sit alongside the Mabinogi’s Blodeuwedd; Lynette Roberts alongside Fleetwood Mac; the gold dinar of King Offa in the British Museum alongside the abbot killed at the Battle of Pwll Melyn in 1405. A late suite set in Cyprus — cicadas, zivania, Sappho, Aphrodite’s Cypriot name — carries the same attention abroad.

‘These lush fields / are airbrushed too, / their stories metres deep.’ That is the argument of the book, and it belongs to every post-industrial landscape in Europe now being quietly re-greened. The Storm’s Flora won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize and the Laurel Prize for ecopoetry.