Raw Garden

Most of the country is unnatural. Even apparently wild places such as moors and commons were created by a complex chain of decisions: to fell trees, to graze animals, to drain land. Helen Dunmore's The Raw Garden relates these changes wrought in the landscape through centuries of human intervention to the fascinating and sometimes terrifying state of change made possible by recent advances in genetic engineering. This book of closely linked poems celebrates a familiar world of landscape and human relationships, but at the same time it leads us to explore and question our own "sense of the natural".