The Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. The landscape, teetering on apocalypse, is characterised by collision and disintegration. Among fragments of memory and history are meticulously journaled observations of the natural world: the moorhen who 'with exaggerated delicacy steps / free of the reedbeds'; the dragonfly that 'pushes itself through the armour / of its body' to be born. The world is populated by archangels and wild gods, the roar of military aircraft, hunting dogs caught permanently suspended in the chase and a car that veers from the road into the floodwater in which the whole collection is saturated. Human relations are fleeting and vulnerable, appearing in the impression of a wedding or the recurring moments captured between a father and son, who make between them delicate balsawood constructions, which - as the poems do themselves - take flight in the turmoil, ecstatic one moment, plunged into darkness the next. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.

While it is generally accepted that flood pulsing and disturbance dynamics are critical to wetland viability, there is as yet no consensus among those responsible for wetland restoration about how best to plan for those phenomena or even whether it is really necessary to do so at all. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Beth Middleton draws upon the latest research from around the world to build a strong case for making flood pulsing and disturbance dynamics integral to the wetland restoration planning process. While the initial chapters of the book are devoted to laying the conceptual foundations, most of the coverage is concerned with demonstrating the practical implications for wetland restoration and management of the latest ecological theory and research. It includes a fascinating case history section in which Dr. Middleton explores the restoration models used in five major North American, European, Australian, African, and Asian wetland projects, and analyzes their relative success from the perspective of flood pulsing and disturbance dynamics planning. Wetland Restoration also features a wealth of practical information useful to all those involved in wetland restoration and management, including: A compendium of water level tolerances, seed germination, seedling recruitment, adult survival rates, and other key traits of wetland plant species A bibliography of 1,200 articles and monographs covering all aspects of wetland restoration A comprehensive directory of wetland restoration ftp sites worldwide An extensive glossary of essential terms Wetland Restoration, Flood Pulsing, and Disturbance Dynamics is a valuable working resource for wetland restoration consultants, employees of government agencies, and professional land managers, as well as ecologists, foresters, and geologists involved with wetland restoration and management. It is also an excellent text for advanced courses in wetland restoration.

The poems in Maurice Riordan's second collection are unusual in their recourse to the humanist belief in poetry as one of the forms of knowledge, imparting information about the observable world; but they also mix ancient wisdom (signs and wonders) with the open-ended science of the quantum age. Riordan's vision is syncretist. The old and new coexist - interrogating the book's epigraph that 'time is what keeps everything from happening at once' - and this informs his more personal poems: childhood memories of rural Ireland and poems of irretrievable loss nuanced with the restorative intimation that time's arrow is not, perhaps, relentlessly linear.

This book presents a three-phase methodology for the efficient diagnosis of “dry dikes”. It is invaluable for anyone involved in dike safety; notably owners, managers, engineers and contractors, and provides all the information required for effective dike diagnosis and for initiating more extensive work or more detailed study.