Combining poetry with the long essay ‘Thirty Ways of Looking at the Sea’, which charts her involvement with the Marine Conservation Society as resident poet as they launched an appeal to tackle the threats facing thirty marine species, Words the Turtle Taught Me sees Susan Richardson writing at the height of her powers as a poet, an ecological campaigner and as a writer about the process of composing inventive, compelling poems. 'Susan Richardson's work is a suspended state, caught between the us we presume to be and the species with which we share this watery, fragile planet. Cut and precise, archaic and innovative, transcendent and in-the-moment, she sees the life of the sea as a mirror of ourselves, and vice versa: always changing, always the same. This beautifully written and exquisitely illustrated compendium summons up the sea we always thought it to be, but which now hovers in the balance… Words the Turtle Taught Me comes as a vital, glorious and salutary lesson for us all.' Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan & The Sea Inside 'Scar' Phoca vitulina Cliff at full-stretch. Gorse grazing face. Twitch of a frayed Grayling. Watching a seal beach herself beyond the sea's reach, her skin's narrative punctuated with scrapes and nicks – comma, colon, quote mark, asterisk – plus one hyper-extended hyphen, emphatic underline, overlong minus sign.