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yet the reader in me still bristles at the disorganization— the random-feeling tracklist— of a collection that is billed as ‘a must-have book for all’ as one blurb puts it. I’m all for abundance, but where Black Nature shines in cultivating intersectional and intergenerational black voices in a space that feels at all times meaningfully curated, Queer Nature suffers a bit from it’s untended distension. Where this collection truly shines is in the inclusion of lesser known contemporary poets, like the aforementioned Jensen and Ang, as well as other newcomers like Kayleb Ray Candrilli and Aaron Apps. It’s a good idea to place these types of voices along with more established living contemporaries like Phillips and Ocean Vuong along with the passed away giants of the 20th and 19th centuries, and I enjoyed the experience of seeing poems I’ve encountered and liked on Twitter share the same binding as Audre Lorde’s Diving Into The Wreck, Elizabeth Bishop’s Song For The Rainy Season, and Emily Dickinson’s Could I but ride indefinite. And these poems do speak to each other, if sometimes at a strange remove. As Walsh notes in his introduction, the dynamic speaker in Benjamin Garcia’s Ode to the Corpse Flower is certainly gazing backwards with a few words for Walt Whitman. And Whitman certainly has some things to say back through the abyss: his morbid fascination with the rotting meat beneath the soil in This Compost is beautifully paired with Garcia’s rumination on the Corpse Flower (“fuck Whitman fuck pound // give me Emily D”). But as Whitman declares “I will run a furrough with my plow, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,” I can’t help but wish to read a reply from William Blake, himself a sort of queer ecopoet, reaching across another century, and over an ocean entreating Whitman to “drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead.” And this is where I’m left as a reader of Queer Nature: wanting a bit less from this collection, in order to glean a bit more. CALEB NICHOLS 71 POETRY WALES

Hannah Lowe The Kids (Bloodaxe, 2021, £10.99) Kate Simpson ed. Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press, 2021, £12.99) The Kids is Hannah Lowe’s third full collection. It focuses on teaching and learning and is rooted in real life drama – her work as a teacher in a London school, her own childhood, and her experience of being a parent. It has struck a chord with readers, I think, because it doesn’t sugar-coat reality and the truths it delivers feel like they’ve been drawn from a deep well, not just tagged on for poetic effect. The poems are sonnets, except for one poem in 7-lined stanzas. Most are in a loose iambic pentameter and employ slant end-rhymes. The tone and diction are plain – it’s unlikely you’ll have much cause to use a dictionary – although that description doesn’t do justice to the technical achievement of getting tightly formal poems to sound contemporary and intimate. Winning the Costa Book of the Year Award has given the book visibility and it may well appeal to people who aren’t often exposed to poems. It combines significant virtuosity with themes that connect to present-day concerns. ‘The Art of Teaching II’ sets the scene with a class of less able pupils reading Frankenstein (“Even the clock-face is pained”), where “the task/, is unchanging like spending years chasing a monster/ you yourself created.” Near the end of the book, ‘Balloons’ pictures a group of enthusiastic five-year-olds desperate to answer their teacher’s questions, “any answer, just the chance to try”, but this is contrasted with the secondary school pupils: In the common room we said it only took one class, one hour, to know the grades they’d get, as though there were a Magic 8 Ball, wedged at one conclusion, no matter how hard you shook. However, The Kids isn’t depressing. Despite the stark portrayal of social and economic barriers to learning, the sadistic teachers that anyone over a certain age will recognise, and the tensions of living in a polarised nation, there is plenty of humour, compassion and hope. ‘Boy’ edgily represents the role of a teacher – a figure of influence, whose job is partly to set children free from influence and make their own way in the world. A boy would sometimes catch Lowe’s eye “across the packed canteen/ and hold me there”. Years later, she spots him at a music festival, “shirtless in the shadow with sparkly girls”: He bent to light a spliff below their tree and looked my way – then looked away from me. ‘Sonnet for Boredom’ begins with Lowe’s son talking about video games, which seem to offer all the constant stimulation a child could want, but Lowe is aware of the dangers. She reflects on how bored she often felt at six-years old: unpicking stickers to stick them down again, wishing for a tiny secret door below the bed, for the curtain elves and gnomes to stand on toadstools, whispering my name. Are hours with the iPad worse than the boredom? Boredom can be frustrating and lonely, and also be a gateway for the imagination. The present and future aren’t necessarily better or worse than the past, the poem implies – it’s what we make of where we are. 72 POETRY WALES

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yet the reader in me still bristles at the disorganization— the random-feeling tracklist— of a collection that is billed as ‘a must-have book for all’ as one blurb puts it. I’m all for abundance, but where Black Nature shines in cultivating intersectional and intergenerational black voices in a space that feels at all times meaningfully curated, Queer Nature suffers a bit from it’s untended distension. Where this collection truly shines is in the inclusion of lesser known contemporary poets, like the aforementioned Jensen and Ang, as well as other newcomers like Kayleb Ray Candrilli and Aaron Apps. It’s a good idea to place these types of voices along with more established living contemporaries like Phillips and Ocean Vuong along with the passed away giants of the 20th and 19th centuries, and I enjoyed the experience of seeing poems I’ve encountered and liked on Twitter share the same binding as Audre Lorde’s Diving Into The Wreck, Elizabeth Bishop’s Song For The Rainy Season, and Emily Dickinson’s Could I but ride indefinite.

And these poems do speak to each other, if sometimes at a strange remove. As Walsh notes in his introduction, the dynamic speaker in Benjamin Garcia’s Ode to the Corpse Flower is certainly gazing backwards with a few words for Walt Whitman. And Whitman certainly has some things to say back through the abyss: his morbid fascination with the rotting meat beneath the soil in This Compost is beautifully paired with Garcia’s rumination on the Corpse Flower (“fuck Whitman fuck pound // give me Emily D”). But as Whitman declares “I will run a furrough with my plow, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,” I can’t help but wish to read a reply from William Blake, himself a sort of queer ecopoet, reaching across another century, and over an ocean entreating Whitman to “drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead.” And this is where I’m left as a reader of Queer Nature: wanting a bit less from this collection, in order to glean a bit more.

CALEB NICHOLS

71 POETRY WALES

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