By turns playful and tender, offering a formally-various exploration of migration, community, and nursing... there is honesty, musicality, a powerful heart

Captivating...playful...moving, witty and agile...These poems have a tended quality, as though Ante's kindness as a nurse extended to them. She is an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude, not neglecting to see her situation within a wider cultural and historical context

A poetry of rapturous images and riveting conscience

Romalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with. A flower of both the Philippines and the Black Country, her vivid, sensual poems weave a fascinating and moving story of migration and loss, caring and tenderness

[A] tour-de-force

What might it mean to survive the incandescent distances between here and all we’ve ever left behind—the languages, the myths, the keepsakes and names? How can we return to lost things and those who love us, relearn what draws away from memory? Romalyn Ante traces paths back through such questions with the grace of lancets, illuminating scars and landscapes, celebrating the “invisible…goddesses of caring and tending” in this brilliant collection. It is something of miracle to experience a debut that charts our "dislocated world" with such incisive generosity. I am beyond grateful for these poems—each one pulsing with “the rhythm of a shockable heart.”

Ante's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core whose intensity she sustains elegantly throughout the collection

Poignant, beautiful, and meditative writing on movement - living in a foreign country, being away from one's family, speaking a language not quite your own... This is possibly the most beautiful thing I have read this year

Ante writes with a voice that I can only imagine develops when the act of care is central to one's life. She minces no words. Antiemetic for Homesickness manages to stand so coherently as a collection on account of how the poems' polyphony of voices interact with one another. We are at the mercy of her retort to those who underestimate immigrant workers

Romalyn Ante's debut collection presents an important and magical display of culture and perspective. There is always that memory that pervades someone's mind of what it is to migrate from one's home to another place. How are the people back home? The people who were left behind, how are they? Have they changed? [Antiemetic for Homesickness] aims to tackle those questions with folklore and spirit and honor

Ante has an assured hand, with a mastery of form and freshness of vision... these are poems that pay testimony to Ante's deep sense of humanity, authenticity, and caring, together with a desire to make the best of what life brings

The 35 poems in this collection document stories of yearning as well as pluck and hard love... I'm rewarded with the privilege of witnessing how the poet-speaker's attention and empathy for others in the world continues to generously unfold

Ante is an adept artist who can seamlessly internalise the external and externalise the internal... This collection is also a treatise on mothering, un-mothering, and more significantly, remothering. The book is dedicated to Ante's mother, whose presence in many forms is palpable and penetrating

The collection shines a welcome light on a too-often overlooked community, whose hard work and dedication to keeping the NHS afloat -- both before the pandemic and more so now -- puts this country enormously in debt

Helen Macdonald's new essays are no flights of fancy, as she examines who has the right to define and be the gatekeepers to the natural world... [Vesper Flights shares] many of the qualities of H is for Hawk - frankness, reflective thinking, formidable powers of observation and wordcraft.

Macdonald is a glorious writer... This book will make you look a bit harder at the wonders around you.

Interesting and accomplished... Vesper Flights establishes her [Macdonald] as a penetrating analyst of the relationship between humans and the non-human world... She is splendid company reflecting on nests and the meaning of home and place.

I finished the book seeing the natural world, and my place within it, afresh.

One of this century's greatest nature writers, Helen Macdonald takes simple moments - of nesting birds, wild boars emerging from the woods, foraging for mushrooms on an autumn day - and weaves them with history, personal reflection and political comment.

H is for Hawk turned many a reader into a goshawk fan... This lyrical essay collection also explores human relationships with the natural world, but has a wider scope, taking in a search for the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests and swan-upping on the Thames.

Vesper Flights...reminds us we too are part of the natural world.

Vesper Flights...[takes] the reader on exhilarating adventures.

This nature writer's long-awaited follow-up to her influential 2014 memoir H is for Hawk is a treat: dive into essays about headaches and high-rises, catching swans and farming ostriches.

Their subject matter is marvellously diverse, taking in nests, ants, hares, glow-worms, mushrooms, migration and more... These are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes to the state of the environment.

Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose.

Gorgeously evocative prose, original insights and deep knowledge.

[Macdonald's] beautifully written essays go a long way to improving our perception.

A collection of wonderfully evocative essays on wildlife.

[An] urgently beautiful book about the haunted meanings of belonging in the world.

Stunning.

Vesper Flights weaves a beautiful proposition: by noticing how wonder arises and flows, we can learn something about what it means to be alive.

These individual essays are about badgers and ants, goldfinches and swans, but through their constellation Macdonald is able to get at something fundamental about the human condition.

I should have started reading Helen Macdonald a long time ago and now I'm unlikely to stop. These essays and reflections are just as compelling as her celebrated H is for Hawk, and come together as a kind of manual for being in the world as you look at it.

Lovely, thoughtful and sometimes sobering essays on the vanishing natural world.

This book is a powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.