Book Review: Wildflowers in Oyster Stone by Claire Thom
To open Wildflowers in Oyster Stone is to step into a place both immediate and ancient, where Cádiz speaks in the language of wind, salt, and stone. Claire Thom writes in the brief forms of haiku, tanka, and haibun, but what she records are not fragments — they are flashes of orientation, ways of knowing a landscape as it changes underfoot.
The oyster stone itself, made from shells and time, becomes an emblem for these poems. Each carries the memory of what has passed through — fishermen unloading buckets, flamingos at dusk, goats threading the mountain paths — while pointing to what is fragile, imperilled, or nearly gone. The brevity holds a kind of defiance: against the forgetting that comes with speed, against the erasure of detail.
These poems are not solitary. They stand in company with the coast, with whitewashed villages, with the long shadows of history. A haiku about penitents at a bar during Holy Week tells us that reverence is rarely pure, that joy and ritual coexist in the same breath. A fisherman’s patience, a neighbour’s argument beneath a parakeet’s nest, a child’s football scattering fallen oranges — each moment is anchored to its environment, inseparable from the land and weather that make it possible.
There is a quiet urgency here. Heatwaves, flash floods, parched reservoirs — Thom names them without rhetoric, simply as lived reality. In doing so, she shows us how attention itself can be a form of care, how poetry can conserve what the eye refuses to overlook.
Reading Wildflowers in Oyster Stone feels like walking with someone who notices everything, who pauses to watch a dragonfly or listen to goats’ bells crossing a ridge. These poems remind us that place is not a backdrop but a companion, and that to notice is a way of belonging.
Claire Thom is a Scottish poet based in southern Spain. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press and co-host of The Wee Sparrow Poetry Podcast. Her work has appeared in international journals and presses, including The Mainichi and The British Haiku Society. She is the author of Wildflowers in Oyster Stone, a collection of haiku, tanka, and haibun.