Much with Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction: unusual descriptions of frogs, birds, and a great stag that 'you will not see'. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel, the author's wild swimming being just one kind of immersion. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworth's, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.
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Everyone everywhere is talking about the moon. FULL WOLF MOON
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(@SerenBooks, 18 October 2021, ebook, 80 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveInc)
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I really enjoyed Much with Body. The poems are well-written and engaging. I don't usually like poems that use the natural world as a theme or base-line but I really enjoyed the style and language of the poems in this collection. There are also subtle references to the pandemic which I enjoyed. I'd recommend this.