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Much With Body
In Much With Body , Polly Atkin displays her gifts as a vibrant and provocative contemporary nature poet. The dramatic landscapes of the Lake District and the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth give rise to these poems. A life-long negotiation with a set of chronic health conditions brings urgency to her warning we can’t expect nature to save us.
- GenresPoetryNatureDisability
72 pages, Paperback
First published January 18, 2022
53 people want to read
About the author
Polly Atkin
15 books43 followersPolly Atkin is an English poet and academic.
She lives in Cumbria and teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She has published widely in magazines and literary journals, and her pamphlet, Bone Song, was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award.
Her second pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches, won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize and is published by Seren.
She lives in Cumbria and teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She has published widely in magazines and literary journals, and her pamphlet, Bone Song, was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award.
Her second pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches, won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize and is published by Seren.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 21, 2025
I've been enjoying Polly Atkin's poetry... I enjoyed her first collection, and I enjoyed this one too...
...SLOWLY 🙂
I esp liked:
Slitting the vein ♥
Leeches ♥
there were many others too 🙂
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
read as a paper book 🙂
...SLOWLY 🙂
I esp liked:
Slitting the vein ♥
Leeches ♥
there were many others too 🙂
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
read as a paper book 🙂
January 31, 2022
Very nice collection of poetry that beautifully incorporates nature and landscape into them. The pandemic can also be found on the fringes of the poems and they are very seasonal. I thoroughly enjoyed them. :) 4.5 stars
April 10, 2023
This second collection of Atkin’s is dedicated to Dorothy Wordsworth. The title is a quote from Dorothy, written during one of her bouts of illness. It has the feel of someone who is thinking a lot about how she is. But it captures, too, a strength of mind.
Atkin lives in the Lake District and was researching into Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries for her biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), the first time a biographer has investigated the ill health amounting to disability that Dorothy suffered. This poetry collection partly came out of that work.
The dedication is also for ‘all those who live with pain’. I do. Mine is nothing spectacular, but it will not be lessening. Rather the opposite as old age encroaches, of course. I wish Atkin had been a bit more specific about her own experience of pain (having mentioned it as germane) as I never quite know how to deal with mine. It did, however, made me think about whether I write through the pain, despite the pain, or ignoring the pain. Atkin, I believe, wrote these poems sometimes in a kind of ecstasy of pain. But you do not need to be in pain to enjoy these poems. They are wise about the human heart and the natural world. And if you know the Lake District you will find it drawn vividly within this collection.
Tiny extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries have been arranged by the poet to form a ‘found’ trio of poems in the middle of this volume. They reiterate repeatedly the many ways to express rain and pain, and as such I didn’t find Dorothy or the Lake District benefitted much from them. To be honest, I’m not sure they are poems at all.
However, other poems in this collection are first class. Here are three examples.
‘Dark Hedges/Barbed Wire’. Hedges planted long ago have grown tall and face each other across a narrow road. They are the remaining evidence of some feud now (hopefully) forgotten. In the tight middle of them the constituent beeches have grown tangled through the barbed wire originally threaded through them when they were first planted:
“Dark hedges are oozing, weeping spikes of rust
twists of rust push through their skin like thorns …
barbs through their skin, as thought the beeches were martyrs …”
The poem carries a lot of freight. This painful martyrdom is one part, the feud constitutes another; (this is a famous hedge). And finally, the pain of a more ordinary laceration brings it closer to home.
In the collection there is a series of poems entitled ‘Notes from a transect’, which term I had to look up (always a pleasure to be sent to the dictionary). In case you also need to know, a transect is “a straight line or narrow section through an object or natural feature or across the earth’s surface, along which observations are made or measurements taken.” The sequence deals with the wholesale death of species. It is something that I feel keenly myself. We’re living in such a diminishing world: the speed of the destruction is eye-watering. Atkin has caught it well. These poems hit me hard. Here is a little from the final poem in the sequence, ‘Charismatic Animals’:
“Is it cheaper to weep for a sea otter – clutching
paws in the water – than a lake? The scientist
herself is moved by ospreys. The poet
is guilty of magical thinking, reads
each tip of the barn owl’s head as a message,
each heron as gift, each slow worm, each bee
as a personal envoy…”
There are many other poems of this high quality in the collection. But the stand out poem, for me, is ‘Bear in the Library’. This is a magic realism sort of exploration of bearness, touching lightly on the history of the bear in this country. How bears were baited and exterminated in Britain, how it has, apparently, been illegal to keep a bear for dancing only since 1911. The bear growls low in its throat as it reads, roams the stacks looking for prey, which is to say, reading material. It joins the world as a thinking being at the same time as it has disappeared entirely from our ken. Here is a little bit of one stanza:
“… Everyone could use a bear sometimes
but there’s nothing worse than a bear in the library
breathing at my side when you’re trying to write
and a poem sticks in your jaw, rewritten
for the bear …”
Read more living poets!
Atkin lives in the Lake District and was researching into Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries for her biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), the first time a biographer has investigated the ill health amounting to disability that Dorothy suffered. This poetry collection partly came out of that work.
The dedication is also for ‘all those who live with pain’. I do. Mine is nothing spectacular, but it will not be lessening. Rather the opposite as old age encroaches, of course. I wish Atkin had been a bit more specific about her own experience of pain (having mentioned it as germane) as I never quite know how to deal with mine. It did, however, made me think about whether I write through the pain, despite the pain, or ignoring the pain. Atkin, I believe, wrote these poems sometimes in a kind of ecstasy of pain. But you do not need to be in pain to enjoy these poems. They are wise about the human heart and the natural world. And if you know the Lake District you will find it drawn vividly within this collection.
Tiny extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries have been arranged by the poet to form a ‘found’ trio of poems in the middle of this volume. They reiterate repeatedly the many ways to express rain and pain, and as such I didn’t find Dorothy or the Lake District benefitted much from them. To be honest, I’m not sure they are poems at all.
However, other poems in this collection are first class. Here are three examples.
‘Dark Hedges/Barbed Wire’. Hedges planted long ago have grown tall and face each other across a narrow road. They are the remaining evidence of some feud now (hopefully) forgotten. In the tight middle of them the constituent beeches have grown tangled through the barbed wire originally threaded through them when they were first planted:
“Dark hedges are oozing, weeping spikes of rust
twists of rust push through their skin like thorns …
barbs through their skin, as thought the beeches were martyrs …”
The poem carries a lot of freight. This painful martyrdom is one part, the feud constitutes another; (this is a famous hedge). And finally, the pain of a more ordinary laceration brings it closer to home.
In the collection there is a series of poems entitled ‘Notes from a transect’, which term I had to look up (always a pleasure to be sent to the dictionary). In case you also need to know, a transect is “a straight line or narrow section through an object or natural feature or across the earth’s surface, along which observations are made or measurements taken.” The sequence deals with the wholesale death of species. It is something that I feel keenly myself. We’re living in such a diminishing world: the speed of the destruction is eye-watering. Atkin has caught it well. These poems hit me hard. Here is a little from the final poem in the sequence, ‘Charismatic Animals’:
“Is it cheaper to weep for a sea otter – clutching
paws in the water – than a lake? The scientist
herself is moved by ospreys. The poet
is guilty of magical thinking, reads
each tip of the barn owl’s head as a message,
each heron as gift, each slow worm, each bee
as a personal envoy…”
There are many other poems of this high quality in the collection. But the stand out poem, for me, is ‘Bear in the Library’. This is a magic realism sort of exploration of bearness, touching lightly on the history of the bear in this country. How bears were baited and exterminated in Britain, how it has, apparently, been illegal to keep a bear for dancing only since 1911. The bear growls low in its throat as it reads, roams the stacks looking for prey, which is to say, reading material. It joins the world as a thinking being at the same time as it has disappeared entirely from our ken. Here is a little bit of one stanza:
“… Everyone could use a bear sometimes
but there’s nothing worse than a bear in the library
breathing at my side when you’re trying to write
and a poem sticks in your jaw, rewritten
for the bear …”
Read more living poets!
August 14, 2023
I truly wanted to love this poetry collection and I found in it an honesty that is both uncomfortable, vulnerable, and beautiful, but I found much that was written too abstract, or perhaps too personal, for me to find a place in it as a reader.
I loved 'Queen of the Woods' and 'Leeches' and am glad to have read 'Much With Body' just for them. The Dorothy Wordsworth poems are haunting, and many of the pieces here on pain and disability felt searingly honest, but I found myself feeling that I was on the other side of dark glass and unable to quite understand what was happening on the poet's side.
I hope to read Polly Atkin's book on disability and nature connection, 'Some of Us Just Fall', soon and may return to this poetry collection afterwards. I am hoping that it will offer me a way in...
I loved 'Queen of the Woods' and 'Leeches' and am glad to have read 'Much With Body' just for them. The Dorothy Wordsworth poems are haunting, and many of the pieces here on pain and disability felt searingly honest, but I found myself feeling that I was on the other side of dark glass and unable to quite understand what was happening on the poet's side.
I hope to read Polly Atkin's book on disability and nature connection, 'Some of Us Just Fall', soon and may return to this poetry collection afterwards. I am hoping that it will offer me a way in...
May 11, 2024
(only read unwalking)
May 2, 2025
Beautiful book of poetry, exploring a connection to nature, the struggles of chronic illness, and a desire to do good and make change in a vast world.
June 10, 2023
Feel like i understand poetry now xo
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews