"Eliza O’Toole’s landmark work is much more than a ‘word-hoard’ of and around the farmland of East Anglia, the territory of Constable and Gainsborough. This is an angular book of linguistic inventiveness and substance, at once multilingual and polyphonic employing different registers to accommodate a divergent range and depth of agricultural, botanical, lepidoptera, historical and etymological knowledge. Each poem is in the present with an imposing sense of the past being visible within a mutable natural world. This is a mapping of place that digs deep down into the biochemistry and fragility of the land, wildlife, plants, insects, animals and farming life. In its slant investigation of the layered traces of time worked into the land, it considers whether current farming practices are obsolete by asking obliquely, ‘can the land afford a farm’ or ‘has the farm already been bought’? As a lexical analogue of the land, it delivers a vibrant, messy, stricken world of polychronic becomings. This is an extraordinary achievement." —David Caddy