Mara Crossing

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow''s real home? And what does ''native'' mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain?

In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel''s original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration.

''We''re all from somewhere else,'' she begins, traci...