Polly Atkin is an award-winning poet and non-fiction writer whose work focuses on nature, place and disability. Her previous poetry collections published with Seren include Basic Nest Architecture (2017) and Much With Body (2021). Her non-fiction books include Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband 2021), Some Of U Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre 2023) which won the Lakeland Book of the Year 2024, and The Company of Owls (Elliot and Thompson 2024). She works as a freelancer from her home in the Lake District where she co-owns the historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.

The title of this collection, a striking juxtaposition of two words whose meanings lie either side of the notions of action and inaction, reality and unreality, creates a sense of ambiguity and tension within the mind of the reader. The poems do battle with each other, creating an emotional landscape of social and political upheaval seen from the standpoint of disability “when our bodies are tumbling / terrified through grey undifferentiated days”. The theme of disability is underscored in the opening poem ‘Dislocation’ which opens with the words “I have never been there, the country they call / Health” and ends with the following couplets:

 

     My bones my home, a republic out

     of joint, always slipping from its sockets like I slip

     between surfaces, the way I click back into

     myself, belonging where I always belonged.

 

The content is structured into six parts, numbered as a series of seasons, in which Atkin employs a series of recurring motifs so that, while each poem is complete in itself, they form a cohesive whole. Frequent mentions of specific animals, real or imagined, fly, roam or prowl through its pages. In Atkin’s poems, for example, “every garden has an owl of its own”. In ‘Garden Version’ there is “a profusion of owls”. Deer are observed from a distance and then close-up. In ‘Self Portrait as Didi’, Atkin takes on the persona of the deer herself:

     In this version I am a deer. I have grown

     stubby two-pronged antlers on my roebuck

     head through a winter I will not talk of.

 

Later, in the same poem she writes:

     Isn’t this what I wanted? To embody

     wild-deerness. Iconic. Time told in antler.

In ‘Fox/Plague Year Season 3’, the image of a fox crossing the road at four in the morning, “carefully glancing / in both directions before she stepped out, / confident in the winter night” becomes a metaphor for taking charge of oneself. The animal is a “Road-safe Fox. Warning Fox. / Fox in command of personal responsibility”. The animal kingdom is never far from the human one in Atkin’s poetry. There is a clear symbiotic relationship between these worlds.

Aside from the appearance of specific animals, ‘pain’, ‘plague’, ‘trees’, ‘moss’ and ‘stars’ are just some of the key words which recur throughout the book as metaphors for feelings, fear, security, comfort and hope. The series of poems titled ‘Pain Metaphors’ yield up a sense of dislocation with lines such as these: “Disheartening is when your heart slips out of its dock / in the harbour of your ribs …” and, from the second poem bearing the same title, “Like trying to run in a dream when your body / won’t let you”.  Specific poems addressed to trees (oak, silver birch, larch and yew) speak of her affinity with, and love of, the natural world. In ‘Moss Oak’ she writes

     I sat with it through bare times. Then summer pushed up

     blockades of bracken – poured down rains

     that sank the ways I knew to reach it.

Her poems pivot between autumn and winter, life and death, darkness and light. ‘Cold Long Day’ begins with the lines “There is the lightening half  / and the darkening half”. Suffice to say, Atkin never loses sight of the need to put a positive spin on things. In ‘The grey wagtail teaches’ she affirms that “we are always carrying summer in our bellies / even when all we can see is the under /carriage of clouds with no visible seams”. She “turns [her] face to the sun at every opportunity” and fills her pockets “with all the sun [she] can carry.” Returning to the deer imagery, she puts into practice her “big antler energy”. The poems in Emergency Dream are vivid, moving and bright. Atkin is a survivor who has the gift of being able to find beauty in the toughest of times. Highly recommended.

Polly Atkin: Emergency Dream, Seren, £10.99