Poetry review – THE LUCK: Alex Josephy is moved by Jane Routh’s poems about human impact upon the rest of the natural world
The Luck
Jane Routh
smith|doorstep
ISBN 978-1-914914-87-4
£10.99
Lancashire-based, Jane Routh is well known and widely admired for poetry in which she explores close connections with the natural world in fresh, sure-footed language; The Luck is Routh’s fifth collection for Smith|Doorstep. Reading through in one sitting is an immersive, uplifting experience, and repeated readings continue to yield unexpected layers of meaning, imagery and pattern. These are poems I feel lucky to know.
Encompassing Foot and Mouth disease in cattle, bird flu, the Covid pandemic, and ongoing extinctions, Routh manages to celebrate the natural world even as she confronts our seeming inability, or unwillingness, to reverse the crisis:
…we’ll go on
like Easter Islanders, holding onto our faith
in back-to-normal-before-long.
Routh’s experience of lockdown is rooted in the hard realities rural life. Her description of the culling of geese ‘at any sign of illness’ during the H5N1 epidemic is followed (in the order in which the poems appear) by a greater sense of personal and community disaster during Foot and Mouth:
Smoke from the pyres and an eery glow
in the north west skies. Never mind
mere business gone: it was your life
your home, your family’s history.
Numbness. Suicides.
Then with Covid, the fear and danger move even closer:
..we’ve no handholds
for being grounded here and now
with so much missing information…
…we’ll need our wits all scattered
and with them words
Following the opening sequence on viruses, “The verge” gives us a vigorous breath of wilderness; a roadside run wild with ‘a shock of growth’ during the pandemic, described in luscious, sensual bursts of language:
a thigh-high wild raspberry thicket among hardheads
and tufted vetch and great willow herb,
a patch of palest cream honeysuckle the evening topnote
over damp and rank verdure and crushed fern.
The final lines announce and enact a beautifully achieved volta, in which a ‘turn’ takes on new resonances, and the verge becomes a metaphor for humanity’s loss of control:
My back turned so briefly and I see
how loose a grip we have on a world on the verge
of turning back to purposes of its own instead of ours.
The passage of time, and how we perceive it, is a constant thread. Many of the poems in which Routh walks in and around the forest extend into long lines or sentences, suggestive of a specifically rural pace. For instance, “A short cut home” becomes a walk so full of observations, small surprises and reflections that ‘the usual short term human things’ for which the poet was hurrying home become insignificant:
…to step into the Little Wood
is to step outside yourself to where time
doesn’t measure itself in ticks and hours
but flows through seasons into centuries…
I especially enjoy the way in which the rhythm of Routh’s work, planting and protecting trees in the Forest of Bowland, seems to underpin and steady the whole sequence. Seasons pass and return, and sometimes the poems loop back to other times; history haunts the present. There are three “Walking Around” poems, and an interspersed sequence of five entitled “The dead never leave”. Lying in bed in an old house, under an ancient ceiling beam, the poet is captivated by the shapes, characters and creatures she imagines in its grain; then by guessing or intuiting ‘a real life of its own before any of this’, she considers its history as a tree, perhaps as far back as the Little Ice Age. Typically of Routh’s poems, this one travels across time and space to land gently in exactly the right place:
its acorn’s white rootlet working wonders,
drawing sunlight inside itself into patterns
to look down as faces above this bed.
The ‘luck’ of the collection’s title is partially explained in “Having the luck”, in which she rebukes ‘an expert on small mustelids’ (small carnivorous mammals; of course I had to look it up). The expert, who has a pessimistically medical theory about why stoats dance, has ‘never had the luck…to see a stoat dancing.’ In Routh’s description, the stoat dance is joyful play, and she defies the expert to disagree:
Don’t anthropomorphise, she can tell me.
Routh may allow herself a little anthropomorphic imagination, but the beauty of these poems lies in their clear-eyed realism. On a personal level, she admits to the random events in her life, ‘the flukes and chaos and choices that ended up here’; this could describe my own life path, and I imagine many others. Where she has ended up turns out to have been lucky, too. In “Hearthed”, the privations of life in an old farmhouse clang and clot against the ear in short bursts, ‘mud, muck, potholes’; no time allocated to unnecessary verbiage:
…some said lead; others, asbestos. Wrangles,
documents, signatures - one long length of blue alkathene.
And yet by the end of the poem, she is ‘hearthed’, with its echo of ‘earthed’:
waking every morning to the same views
in some new manifestation: belonging.
The Luck is full of lucky encounters: grubs and beetles, hissing geese, Otzi the Ice Man, bats, moths, gooseberries and blackcurrants to name a few, and in “Sometimes they recover”, a thrush resplendent in death:
his breast’s black chevrons - and spread coverts
each edged with a matched gold band
you’d never see glint on live wings in flight.
Routh bears witness to natural deaths, and to losses linked to imminent extinctions, without losing sight of hope. Following her father’s advice, “When a man grows old, he starts to plant trees”, she engages in work that is consoling in that it extends beyond one lifetime:
hands in dark earth spreading young roots,
a calm. As of a slate wiped clean.
I have found these poems profoundly moving. Routh makes no grand claims, but with glittering linguistic skill, leavened by moments of unobtrusive humour, she brings the reader close to all that we should value and may soon lose. There is always the bleak hope that we might leave few or no footprints:
and the shining expense of wet sand empty
of any sign of what we have done to the world.
Nov 12 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Jane Routh
Poetry review – THE LUCK: Alex Josephy is moved by Jane Routh’s poems about human impact upon the rest of the natural world
Lancashire-based, Jane Routh is well known and widely admired for poetry in which she explores close connections with the natural world in fresh, sure-footed language; The Luck is Routh’s fifth collection for Smith|Doorstep. Reading through in one sitting is an immersive, uplifting experience, and repeated readings continue to yield unexpected layers of meaning, imagery and pattern. These are poems I feel lucky to know.
Encompassing Foot and Mouth disease in cattle, bird flu, the Covid pandemic, and ongoing extinctions, Routh manages to celebrate the natural world even as she confronts our seeming inability, or unwillingness, to reverse the crisis:
Routh’s experience of lockdown is rooted in the hard realities rural life. Her description of the culling of geese ‘at any sign of illness’ during the H5N1 epidemic is followed (in the order in which the poems appear) by a greater sense of personal and community disaster during Foot and Mouth:
Then with Covid, the fear and danger move even closer:
..we’ve no handholds for being grounded here and now with so much missing information… …we’ll need our wits all scattered and with them wordsFollowing the opening sequence on viruses, “The verge” gives us a vigorous breath of wilderness; a roadside run wild with ‘a shock of growth’ during the pandemic, described in luscious, sensual bursts of language:
The final lines announce and enact a beautifully achieved volta, in which a ‘turn’ takes on new resonances, and the verge becomes a metaphor for humanity’s loss of control:
The passage of time, and how we perceive it, is a constant thread. Many of the poems in which Routh walks in and around the forest extend into long lines or sentences, suggestive of a specifically rural pace. For instance, “A short cut home” becomes a walk so full of observations, small surprises and reflections that ‘the usual short term human things’ for which the poet was hurrying home become insignificant:
I especially enjoy the way in which the rhythm of Routh’s work, planting and protecting trees in the Forest of Bowland, seems to underpin and steady the whole sequence. Seasons pass and return, and sometimes the poems loop back to other times; history haunts the present. There are three “Walking Around” poems, and an interspersed sequence of five entitled “The dead never leave”. Lying in bed in an old house, under an ancient ceiling beam, the poet is captivated by the shapes, characters and creatures she imagines in its grain; then by guessing or intuiting ‘a real life of its own before any of this’, she considers its history as a tree, perhaps as far back as the Little Ice Age. Typically of Routh’s poems, this one travels across time and space to land gently in exactly the right place:
The ‘luck’ of the collection’s title is partially explained in “Having the luck”, in which she rebukes ‘an expert on small mustelids’ (small carnivorous mammals; of course I had to look it up). The expert, who has a pessimistically medical theory about why stoats dance, has ‘never had the luck…to see a stoat dancing.’ In Routh’s description, the stoat dance is joyful play, and she defies the expert to disagree:
Routh may allow herself a little anthropomorphic imagination, but the beauty of these poems lies in their clear-eyed realism. On a personal level, she admits to the random events in her life, ‘the flukes and chaos and choices that ended up here’; this could describe my own life path, and I imagine many others. Where she has ended up turns out to have been lucky, too. In “Hearthed”, the privations of life in an old farmhouse clang and clot against the ear in short bursts, ‘mud, muck, potholes’; no time allocated to unnecessary verbiage:
And yet by the end of the poem, she is ‘hearthed’, with its echo of ‘earthed’:
The Luck is full of lucky encounters: grubs and beetles, hissing geese, Otzi the Ice Man, bats, moths, gooseberries and blackcurrants to name a few, and in “Sometimes they recover”, a thrush resplendent in death:
Routh bears witness to natural deaths, and to losses linked to imminent extinctions, without losing sight of hope. Following her father’s advice, “When a man grows old, he starts to plant trees”, she engages in work that is consoling in that it extends beyond one lifetime:
I have found these poems profoundly moving. Routh makes no grand claims, but with glittering linguistic skill, leavened by moments of unobtrusive humour, she brings the reader close to all that we should value and may soon lose. There is always the bleak hope that we might leave few or no footprints: