Railway embankments are dazzling these days with wild flowers, from marguerites to rosebay willow herb.

This unusual paean to them come from A Bright Acoustic, the latest collection by Philip Gross (Bloodaxe Books, £9.95). The Cornwall-born poet, now based in Wales, won the T S Eliot Prize in 2009 with The Water Table, and, as well as other collections, has also written poetry and 10 novels for the young.

           RAILWAY WEEDS

Where do they think they are,

                                              and who,

this flare-up, free festival, this gypsy wedding

~

of travelling flora, between track and track and rail

and rail; this clinker desert just outside the window, feet away

~

every morning in everyone’s gaze? This scrag end of scree.

This pole of inaccessibility.

                                               It’s brackland, out-of-bound

~

land, flat mountain, a temperate tundra, that’s mean

with its nutrients but hey,

                                            in the flash

~

of its season, it’s sunlight sucked straight in to pink

and carmine, mauve and sherbet-lemon yellow,

~

hardly bothering with green.

                                                What green there is

is kindling, is tinder already. Whoosh. Half-inchers

~

of soil, they make their own fortune, for a week or two,

blow-ins and blow-away, no good investments but what

~

the hell, eh, what better than this: that they’ll do it

again and again.