Poetry review – A NEWER WILDERNESS: Andrew Keanie finds that Nicola Healey’s slim chapbook has much to say about human wellness and well-being
A Newer Wilderness
Nicola Healey
Dare-Gale Press 2024
ISBN: 1915968046
27pp £7.00
Nicola Healey’s debut pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, is about anorexia, and Healey does a great deal, in such a small publication (15 short poems), deftly lifting the contemplation of a misunderstood condition clear of the terminology of the medics and the multitude. But this collection is not only about anorexia. It is also about loss. Just as any poetry reader who was in mourning in the Victorian era could understand and be soothed by Tennyson’s In Memoriam, so too can the mid-2020s reader find A Newer Wilderness full of turns of phrase to stimulate the healing of a broken heart.
The first poem, “A Sky in Winter”, begins in an unpromising hospital setting. The combination of the ward’s whiteness, the dull company of cotton-wool and pills, and the general impression of unnaturalness would bewilder any patient’s anticipation of a return to healthiness: ‘It cancels all bearings’. What about a good gaze, however, in the direction of the natural world just outside the hospital window? It doesn’t seem to be what the doctor ordered, but it has aroused the poet to apostrophise:
A stump or two of crow,
a rush of goldfinches,
a flung charm breaking.
For the poet – not the doctor, of course – there seems to be the possibility, albeit remote, of something miraculous.
In “Anywhere out of the World”, Baudelaire sulkily reported from his hospital ward that all a patient can hope for is a bed different from the one he currently occupies. In other words, for Baudelaire, there is nothing for the patient to hope for, all hospital beds – and indeed all human lives – being pretty much equally direly situated. But perhaps Healey’s Hades of a hospital can be dissolved somehow or transcended somewhere between the looking out of the window and the shifting light in the sky (and the sequent energies in the trees).
The white is flying away in waves,
leaving glimpses of blue.
The trees soften
as though they approve.
(“A Sky in Winter”)
Healey’s trees might have been glimpsed by a William Blake or a Cecil Collins. A Hamlet or a Baudelaire would have been too fussy in his inky cloak, and too obdurate in his despondency, to notice or imagine any restorative potential in arboreal ambiguity.
“Sacred Hunger” begins ‘Buried in the dark’, and with a frank admission of human frailty and an unfiltered recognition of the hospital’s infallible aptitude for taking things away from humans (‘only to find treasures vanished’). There is a moment of contact here with the depths of despair that one might find in Schopenhauer’s proudly clarified pessimism: ‘Life – is a long vivisection’. But there then appears to be a pointing up out of the hopelessness to a less abject level upon which some ensuing struggle or renegotiation might be possible: ‘You are both / maverick scientist and lone animal / trapped in a fluorescent glare.’ Having begun ‘Buried in the dark’, the poem is bewitchingly bookended by the concluding case for being ‘buried in the light’.
Every page is dark, bright, and electrifying, with Healey speaking to the reader in a mode of Romanticism fitter for the explication of body and soul than the waffle of the ‘wellness’ industry or the condescension of healthcare professionals. The phrase ‘buried in the light’ (Wordsworth’s growing boy fading into the light of common day would have been passé) encapsulates how people searching for health in 2025 are coerced and muddled out of their privacy and humanity, and into the compliance and transparency demanded by a system of process and profit.
Healey’s deep knowledge of Romanticism fuses frequently and felicitously with her ingenuity as a shaper of language and line. Expressions such as ‘Time was only an acid bath’ or ‘A skeleton isn’t made to walk alone’ (“Uncovered Bones”) shine with an element of defiance in ‘a world paralysed with principles’, and the guilt and shame of the anorexic’s experience begins to look like a compressed analogy of the predicament of finding oneself hemmed in by 21st century procedures and pieties.
In “The Shape”, Healey follows the wisdom of Lavinia Greenlaw: ‘After any first shock / the next finds its shape waiting.’ The poem then works its way, from Greenlaw’s literary inducement all the way into Healey’s own essential experience of mourning. Whereas Ted Hughes seemed grimly content with the Wagnerian commotion in the sound of his own unanswered phone (‘Do not pick up the telephone’), Healey’s response to the sound of her phone is at least as effective, even if entirely free of Hughes’s hysteria and off-the-wall mansplaining. The final shape in her last line is straightforwardly stunning: ‘I freeze when the phone rings.’
Healey’s cat-like fly (“Fly”), that Blake’s thoughtless hand might have brushed away, is almost gulped down, but it survives to be marvelled at for its intricacy and strenuousness. In other words, it is marvelled at for being just like us – ‘all that / intricate effort-to-be’ – looking before and after and pining for what is not.
In “A Newer Wilderness”, the moonlier moon, the nearly painful birdsong and those words leaping out of their lettery shells feel at once familiar and startlingly fresh:
There is a world
that must lie, always, just beneath
and around the corner from
things as they are.
Where the moon is more moonly,
birdsong almost hurts
and words leap out of their lettery shells.
I don’t know many lines like this as good as this. Perhaps Auden’s ‘As I walked out one evening’ contains some, such as ‘the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street’, ‘the seven stars go squawking / Like geese about the sky’, and ‘The years shall run like rabbits’. And yet Healey’s poem does not (like Auden’s), become merely an anthology of arresting images amongst which one is to love one’s crooked neighbour with one’s crooked heart. Rather, Healey takes the reader straight to an unspoiled vantage point from which the otherwise inscrutable workings of the wilderness of bereavement might be looked at:
Every thing
is simply involved – reaches towards you
out of chaos: cooperates.
It’s lonely to live on
with everything
knowing what it can be.
The lit centre is encrypted again;
the world’s a sphinx.
I am an exile at home.
It is as though the earth
was happy with me,
and now it’s not…
The loss of the loved one has led to a lessening of belonging in the world. The big themes in poetry never change. Euripides, Homer and Sophocles explored the agony of bereavement, the value of mourning rituals and the consolation to be come across in remembrance. So too did Emily Dickinson, of whose ‘wilderness’ Healey has become the 21st century’s outstanding custodian.
By now, in 2025, as we continue to be medicalised and digitized beyond rhyme and reason, browsing for new poetry worth reading has long been believed by busy people to be a preposterous weakness if not a wicked waste of time. And yet, every so often, a new voice in poetry arrives, as if out of nowhere, so full of soul that it feels as if one is being nudged, with a calm and friendly greeting, out of a gloomy dream.
I am breaking out of a tomb.
I know it won’t last – this grace;
but today, I’m free.
(“May Morning”)
A dazzling debut, A Newer Wilderness is hard evidence that the writing and reading of poetry still matters as much as it ever did.
Aug 12 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Nicola Healey
Poetry review – A NEWER WILDERNESS: Andrew Keanie finds that Nicola Healey’s slim chapbook has much to say about human wellness and well-being
Nicola Healey’s debut pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, is about anorexia, and Healey does a great deal, in such a small publication (15 short poems), deftly lifting the contemplation of a misunderstood condition clear of the terminology of the medics and the multitude. But this collection is not only about anorexia. It is also about loss. Just as any poetry reader who was in mourning in the Victorian era could understand and be soothed by Tennyson’s In Memoriam, so too can the mid-2020s reader find A Newer Wilderness full of turns of phrase to stimulate the healing of a broken heart.
The first poem, “A Sky in Winter”, begins in an unpromising hospital setting. The combination of the ward’s whiteness, the dull company of cotton-wool and pills, and the general impression of unnaturalness would bewilder any patient’s anticipation of a return to healthiness: ‘It cancels all bearings’. What about a good gaze, however, in the direction of the natural world just outside the hospital window? It doesn’t seem to be what the doctor ordered, but it has aroused the poet to apostrophise:
For the poet – not the doctor, of course – there seems to be the possibility, albeit remote, of something miraculous.
In “Anywhere out of the World”, Baudelaire sulkily reported from his hospital ward that all a patient can hope for is a bed different from the one he currently occupies. In other words, for Baudelaire, there is nothing for the patient to hope for, all hospital beds – and indeed all human lives – being pretty much equally direly situated. But perhaps Healey’s Hades of a hospital can be dissolved somehow or transcended somewhere between the looking out of the window and the shifting light in the sky (and the sequent energies in the trees).
The white is flying away in waves, leaving glimpses of blue. The trees soften as though they approve. (“A Sky in Winter”)Healey’s trees might have been glimpsed by a William Blake or a Cecil Collins. A Hamlet or a Baudelaire would have been too fussy in his inky cloak, and too obdurate in his despondency, to notice or imagine any restorative potential in arboreal ambiguity.
“Sacred Hunger” begins ‘Buried in the dark’, and with a frank admission of human frailty and an unfiltered recognition of the hospital’s infallible aptitude for taking things away from humans (‘only to find treasures vanished’). There is a moment of contact here with the depths of despair that one might find in Schopenhauer’s proudly clarified pessimism: ‘Life – is a long vivisection’. But there then appears to be a pointing up out of the hopelessness to a less abject level upon which some ensuing struggle or renegotiation might be possible: ‘You are both / maverick scientist and lone animal / trapped in a fluorescent glare.’ Having begun ‘Buried in the dark’, the poem is bewitchingly bookended by the concluding case for being ‘buried in the light’.
Every page is dark, bright, and electrifying, with Healey speaking to the reader in a mode of Romanticism fitter for the explication of body and soul than the waffle of the ‘wellness’ industry or the condescension of healthcare professionals. The phrase ‘buried in the light’ (Wordsworth’s growing boy fading into the light of common day would have been passé) encapsulates how people searching for health in 2025 are coerced and muddled out of their privacy and humanity, and into the compliance and transparency demanded by a system of process and profit.
Healey’s deep knowledge of Romanticism fuses frequently and felicitously with her ingenuity as a shaper of language and line. Expressions such as ‘Time was only an acid bath’ or ‘A skeleton isn’t made to walk alone’ (“Uncovered Bones”) shine with an element of defiance in ‘a world paralysed with principles’, and the guilt and shame of the anorexic’s experience begins to look like a compressed analogy of the predicament of finding oneself hemmed in by 21st century procedures and pieties.
In “The Shape”, Healey follows the wisdom of Lavinia Greenlaw: ‘After any first shock / the next finds its shape waiting.’ The poem then works its way, from Greenlaw’s literary inducement all the way into Healey’s own essential experience of mourning. Whereas Ted Hughes seemed grimly content with the Wagnerian commotion in the sound of his own unanswered phone (‘Do not pick up the telephone’), Healey’s response to the sound of her phone is at least as effective, even if entirely free of Hughes’s hysteria and off-the-wall mansplaining. The final shape in her last line is straightforwardly stunning: ‘I freeze when the phone rings.’
Healey’s cat-like fly (“Fly”), that Blake’s thoughtless hand might have brushed away, is almost gulped down, but it survives to be marvelled at for its intricacy and strenuousness. In other words, it is marvelled at for being just like us – ‘all that / intricate effort-to-be’ – looking before and after and pining for what is not.
In “A Newer Wilderness”, the moonlier moon, the nearly painful birdsong and those words leaping out of their lettery shells feel at once familiar and startlingly fresh:
I don’t know many lines like this as good as this. Perhaps Auden’s ‘As I walked out one evening’ contains some, such as ‘the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street’, ‘the seven stars go squawking / Like geese about the sky’, and ‘The years shall run like rabbits’. And yet Healey’s poem does not (like Auden’s), become merely an anthology of arresting images amongst which one is to love one’s crooked neighbour with one’s crooked heart. Rather, Healey takes the reader straight to an unspoiled vantage point from which the otherwise inscrutable workings of the wilderness of bereavement might be looked at:
The loss of the loved one has led to a lessening of belonging in the world. The big themes in poetry never change. Euripides, Homer and Sophocles explored the agony of bereavement, the value of mourning rituals and the consolation to be come across in remembrance. So too did Emily Dickinson, of whose ‘wilderness’ Healey has become the 21st century’s outstanding custodian.
By now, in 2025, as we continue to be medicalised and digitized beyond rhyme and reason, browsing for new poetry worth reading has long been believed by busy people to be a preposterous weakness if not a wicked waste of time. And yet, every so often, a new voice in poetry arrives, as if out of nowhere, so full of soul that it feels as if one is being nudged, with a calm and friendly greeting, out of a gloomy dream.
I am breaking out of a tomb. I know it won’t last – this grace; but today, I’m free. (“May Morning”)A dazzling debut, A Newer Wilderness is hard evidence that the writing and reading of poetry still matters as much as it ever did.