Polly Atkin teaches English studies at the University of Strathclyde and lives in the Lake District, an inspiration for much of her writing.  Basic Nest Architecture is her debut collection. At least a dozen of its poems have won,  been commended or shortlisted in poetry competitions, and an extract from it was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize in 2014. Atkin also won the Mslexia pamphlet prize in 2012 with her pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches, also published by Seren.

Although the Peak District is on my doorstep and I get out there when I can, this collection made me long for a much more engaged relationship with the natural world. Cover notes describe it as “themed around three interwoven ideas – place as nest, the mind as nest, and the body as nest”.  Between its pages I found a distinctive atmosphere and sensibility. Its dedication reads “for the beautiful wild”, but as you read the poems the speaker and “the beautiful wild” become indivisible.  It is the poet’s embodied presence and her perceptual apparatus that makes the natural world accessible as a felt experience, rather than something “out there” that we visit and contemplate. Starting with a movement away from city and its “film of constant light”, where the speaker felt  “information bloom in my blood. It sang/in my cells” (‘Colony Collapse Disorder’), the embodied self and its surroundings gradually become inextricable.  

Some of the poems do not give themselves up to interpretation lightly; others offer more straightforward entry into aspects of a lived landscape.   I enjoyed ‘The New Path’, which explores a path laid directly through Bainriggs wood in the Lake District, one that Wordsworth resented for the way it disturbed the tranquillity of the lakeshore. “Its public name/is Improvement”, says the poem (I love that capital ‘I’), beautifully laying out the distinction made by the anthropologist Tim Ingold  between “open”, meandering lines, without fixed destinations; and those, like the new path, that are “closed”, that  tell us “The world is for walking /over, not through”.  A similarly inviting poem is ‘When I lived alone’ which sets out the satisfactions of living alone in a house where “I slept curled up against the cool/stretch of its ribs like a cub”. 

Yet this is no simple and potentially sentimental love affair with the speaker’s new home in the country. From its first line, this poem invites uncertainty: “When I lived alone I was clean. Good.” Is the speaker entirely committed to being “good”?  The poem’s detail, though – of drinking Rooibos, the pot of good black coffee on the hob – absolutely showed me what life would be like in this house. ‘Kindling’ similarly drew me into the speaker’s everyday lived experience during “the winter of fires that would not take” where “you piled all you could on your bed but still”.

The collection divides into three sections and as we move into the second one, the speaker’s body becomes increasingly blended with not only her immediate surroundings, the valley and its night-time noises, but also the galaxies that surround her , “the known and unknown/elements of our prowling bodies unfolding/from the blooming sky” (‘Strength in Winter’).  Yet, as in ‘When I lived alone’, these poems refuse to settle for certainty. In ‘Moving’, for example, the speaker fears that her house is flooding while she is away, that her “precious possessions” are perishing. Yet the poem ends with:

     On the train you watch the storm through the window

     redefine the sky and landscape you move through

     not sure anymore if this is a fear

     or a lightness of self

     you aspire to.

If section two explores loss or merger of the self, within either a landscape, another person or dreams, section three comprises still more mysterious, often surreal poems.  Illness and a sense of disorientation are evoked in ‘The Test’ and again in ‘Fog/Fox’ where “I watch Fog swallow/metre by metre the reliable matter//I thought I had figured”.  Even so, in ‘Free Night’, a wonderful “species of madness” fills speakers who “will scorch our sick selves off, turn/weakness to ash” and alongside so many troubled dreams and yearnings, this poem overflows with energy and determination. 

These are poems filled with gorgeous imagery and a magical use of language. They reward re-reading and also researching their sources, taking hold of the ear and the imagination.

The lake is crystal blue, shimmering in the summer sun. It is surrounded by healthy trees on three sides. I sit on the fourth, overlooking the Nene Valley nature park with Basic Nest Architecture in my hand. It is poetry written to be read outdoors. It is a celebration of nature and all that she entails. 

Indeed, in the Wordsworthian tradition, the poem ‘Lake Fever’ evokes the importance of nature to humans. It is home; it is a refuge: it is where we are meant to be. For Wordsworth, the Lake District was the absolute epitome of this; it was his poetic muse; thus, he spent his life there writing. Atkin has followed suit, working with the Wordsworth Trust to complete her PhD studies. At the end of her lake poem, the speaker considers falling into the lake, submerging into the waters and returning to her natural home far away from artificial city life. It is an apt metaphor, one very much aligned with the romantic literary movement. The themes discussed by two hundred-year-old poetry may sound irrelevant today, but the issues it discussed are more important now than ever. It is refreshing to see new poetry written in a similar vein.

Like Atkin, the poets of the age argued for a respectful treatment of wildlife and the environment; they argued for a more eco-conscious approach to the world. The natural world is under constant threat as the human population continues to grow; it is cut back and reduced and the real tragedy of this is recognised in the words of the poet as she describes a declining world. However, 'home' has a different meaning to different people and different things. For the bee, it is the petals of a flower ready to pollinate. For the moon, it is the shadow of the sun. And for humans, it can be many things both internal and external.

Atkin takes this idea much further. As well as recognising that nature can be a nest, she also recognises that the human mind and body can be just as effective refuges. The book is divided into three parts to reflect this idea. 

The mind can become a sanctuary when it understands its place in nature, that it coexists with other creatures. The poem ‘Rabbit in Twilight’ offers a synchronised view of human and rabbit, of man and animal. No matter how far human society builds, no matter how far we distance ourselves from nature, she can, and always will creep back in. The rabbit squeezes under the wooden fence at the farmyard. The motorway, a construct of human design, is surrounded by grass verges and the creatures that come with it. Within the words there is a sense of optimism, that nature could never fully leave us despite what we may do it. Anxiety is removed with such acceptance; we go beyond our own experience and learn to understand that there is no solid divide. We are all part of one planet, of a greater eco-system: we are one.

The body, in the third part of the collection, returns to it once again. The themes are reused and reinforced in the poem “The Centre.” This time a physical experience is evoked. The blood of man, his instinct, knows exactly where he must go and how he must proceed. It directs him back to the centre in which he must go alone with no gifts, food, or drink. His presence is enough. Nature provides the rest, as he leaves “The painted world” with “dimensions all wrong, perspectiveless, tasting of nothing.” He leaves the suburban world and returns to the rural as per the Wordsworthian tradition.

The poems are varied with a plethora of styles and expression, though in each instance the words are permeated with these ideas of nature. As a collection, the poems combine to deliver these recurring themes with potency. They stress the importance of the environment and what it would mean to lose it and become completely disengaged from it. 

As incompetent government ministers are given the environmental secretary post here in the UK time and time again, and as renowned climate change deniers sit in the White House, the environment is under constant and renewed threat. Michael Grove, the current Environment Secretary, even wished to remove climate change from the national education system. 

We become mentally and physically healthier when we are outdoors, an outdoors that is just on a doorstep if we are willing to look after it and trust the protection of it to reliable and sensible people.

Basic Nest Architecture is a collection that is relevant today. By borrowing these themes from the past Atkin demonstrates not only how important arguments from the Romantic era are today but also how essential the natural world is to the human psyche. With her keen senses, she celebrates nature in all its glory. 

I highly recommend this to lovers of our planet, our home, our nest.