“Claire Walker’s subtle and confident poems display a lightness of touch. Fine technique has resulted  in work that is both supple and robust. Images of water predominate, its power and inhabitants serving  as metaphors for permanence and impermanence and the shift of human experience. Walker reflects on connections and collisions between land and sea, female and male, childhood and adulthood, myth and nature. Compelling to read, each of these pieces is concise and delicate yet strong enough to elegantly support themes of emotional weight.” Roy Marshall

“In poems that wash over you like a warm tide, Claire creates an immersive and compelling world, part magic realist, part poignantly recognisable. These are perfectly honed, imagistic poems full of a language that dances on the page and lines that sing in your head long after you have put the book down.” Anna Saunders

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“There is a disquiet that moves through these poems. Walker explores what it means to create a sense of home, and how the people within it build our longings around us. Beautiful work by a rising star in poetry. These are words that linger after the last page.” Angela Readman

“Claire Walker’s quiet, almost still, narrative through these poems could reflect their rural setting or the sadness within the protagonist, yet that quietness is deceptive. There are passions here amid the juxtaposition of man and stag.  These poems will have you checking your fingernails for soil, seeing antlers in your peripheral vision.” Brett Evans

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“Claire Walker’s debut pamphlet The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile is a riveting meditation on motherhood and transformation that crackles with drama. There are moments of lyrical delicacy and oceanic longings, and Walker’s perceptual acuity pitches the reader into a world where nothing is taken at face value – a girl might be a crocodile, a mermaid could become captor, and seeds are studied for their mnemonic potential. This is a work to be savoured.” Carolyn Jess Cooke

“These are poems of growth, fertility and flow – rivers, plants, women. Claire Walker skilfully combines nature, myth and the everyday, and when reading her work, it’s difficult to imagine a world where things are ever any other way. The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile is a stunning, quietly powerful debut pamphlet, full of wistful smiles and blissful tears.” Kate Garrett