Poetry review – LONDON PASTORAL
Colin Pink likes the conversational tone of Maggie Wadey’s well-observed poems situated in urban green spaces
London Pastoral
Maggie Wadey
Paekakariki Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1908133-62-5
£12.50
As with all Paekakariki Press productions London Pastoral is a miniature work of art. Beautifully illustrated by the author and letter press printed, making this book a lovely object as well as a collection of poems.
As the title suggests, this collection is something of an homage to the open spaces found all over London but with a particular focus on the author’s stamping ground of Hackney and Victoria Park. The collection opens on a chilling note with “Fig Tree”, a poem that recalls a time when Victoria Park was neglected ‘with stolen bikes spiking the black canal’ and an American woman was murdered while running in the park ‘like a hare in open season, / a hare trapped, killed, her body left / where it fell in a pool of her own blood.’ This sets one of the themes of the book, which is jeopardy (there is a sequence of poems about the covid pandemic, for instance) and mortality. This sombre note is immediately mollified in the succeeding sequence of poems which celebrate people enjoying the park. Thus “after rain” admires the sparkle of raindrops dripping from a tree and “Dog Man” observes a man exercising his dog and the little rituals they play with each other until ‘the man stoops down, / in one leap the dog has folded himself neatly / over his master’s shoulders.’ It makes for a charming scene; but the poem ends on a countervailing sobering reminder of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal headed god, who weighs the hearts of the dead.
The next section, titled “Plague, 2020”, is a sequence of poems set during covid. In one of them the author joins a queue outside a shop on Bethnal Green Road hoping to purchase some Lapsang Suchong tea; in “Patient 103” she observes a man like ‘an image taken / from a Medieval morality tale’ lying on a trolley in a hospital corridor; and in “Lucky to Have a Garden” she observes a mother, absorbed in her smart phone, ignoring her child. We’re back in the park in “London Autumn, 2020”
in the Park, runners move in ghostlike
solitude and at their feet the trees let fall their leaves
in yellow pathways, beckoning towards
an early end to this year’s deadly summer
The next section is titled “Devon, 2021”. Perhaps that’s where the poems were written but there is no explicit reference to Devon in the poems themselves which mostly have a melancholy quality, remembering a dead lover, reflecting on the predicament of a Screech Owl whose death is ‘brought each day closer by her loss of prey’. The poet makes a contrast with her own life:
whereas I promiscuously devour,
then spit out in verse, every, living thing
that comes my way
A recurring motif in this section is the hare (a much mythologised animal) and one of the best poems is called “The Hare” which is accompanied by a delicately drawn image of the animal. The poem proceeds by defining what a hare is not:
A hare isn’t always in a trap
or hanging from a butcher’s hook.
It isn’t always being jugged, or stewed,
nor does it have to be a symbol for something else,
a fairy story, or a girl gone mad…
and ends with a plea to the reader, to ‘Take yourself out of the picture. Leave her free / to race beyond the snare of your words.’
The next sequence is called “Death” and features a full-page illustration of a crow. It has a somewhat apocalyptic air, dealing with various deaths of animals and people and possibly the planet. The first poem recounts “The Grief of Crows” who make a racket in response to a fox snatching a fledging from the ground and making off with it in its jaws. There are some excellent poems in this section, especially “Paper Boy”, a very well observed piece about a paper-boy who speedily delivers the news: ‘Job done, he’s off, / like he’s running from the scene of some crime, / shoulder-bag packed with rape, war and death – ‘ And then one day the boy makes the mistake of actually looking at the news and sees: ‘a child, much his own age, dark and skinny, / cradling the debris of a tiny body in his lap’.
“At the Door of The Whitechapel Mission” is a very moving poem about the death of the poet’s father. It has a brilliant opening:
My father and I both had name-tapes
sewn into our socks. Me, for boarding-school
where I was to be turned into a lady. My father
to go into a Care Home. To be turned into…
‘Socks’ I said to the young woman at the door.
Later there is the disposal of the deceased’s clothes to charity shops, but when it comes to the socks: ‘they’ve still got his name on / and I’m finding it difficult to hand them over.’
The final section is, although titled “Grief”, focused more on the consolations of nature, such as “The Ecstasy of Thrushes” : ‘above us it hurls its thrilling leitmotif, / the same in storm, in lust or grief’ or in “In Case This Never Comes Again”: ‘…the woods know something / we’ve forgotten. Having come back from death / so many times, they have refused their own extinction.’
To sum up, London Pastoral contains many highly effective poems that repay attention. A few times I felt there was a use of serendipitous internal or random end-line rhyming, which marred some of the lines, and would have been better edited out. A few of the poems came across as trying too hard, lapsing into a rather old-fashioned syntax that made them sound portentous, such as “In Case This Never Comes Again”: ‘keep, keep in memory deep / the flowers and the berries’ or ‘your sweet lovers’ sleep wherein you spin / the self-made fate that’s dancing you’. The more idiomatic poems are much more successful. However, these are minor quibbles and the collection as a whole is accomplished and well-worth reading.
Feb 27 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Maggie Wadey
Poetry review – LONDON PASTORAL
Colin Pink likes the conversational tone of Maggie Wadey’s well-observed poems situated in urban green spaces
London Pastoral
Maggie Wadey
Paekakariki Press, 2025
ISBN 978-1908133-62-5
£12.50
As with all Paekakariki Press productions London Pastoral is a miniature work of art. Beautifully illustrated by the author and letter press printed, making this book a lovely object as well as a collection of poems.
As the title suggests, this collection is something of an homage to the open spaces found all over London but with a particular focus on the author’s stamping ground of Hackney and Victoria Park. The collection opens on a chilling note with “Fig Tree”, a poem that recalls a time when Victoria Park was neglected ‘with stolen bikes spiking the black canal’ and an American woman was murdered while running in the park ‘like a hare in open season, / a hare trapped, killed, her body left / where it fell in a pool of her own blood.’ This sets one of the themes of the book, which is jeopardy (there is a sequence of poems about the covid pandemic, for instance) and mortality. This sombre note is immediately mollified in the succeeding sequence of poems which celebrate people enjoying the park. Thus “after rain” admires the sparkle of raindrops dripping from a tree and “Dog Man” observes a man exercising his dog and the little rituals they play with each other until ‘the man stoops down, / in one leap the dog has folded himself neatly / over his master’s shoulders.’ It makes for a charming scene; but the poem ends on a countervailing sobering reminder of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal headed god, who weighs the hearts of the dead.
The next section, titled “Plague, 2020”, is a sequence of poems set during covid. In one of them the author joins a queue outside a shop on Bethnal Green Road hoping to purchase some Lapsang Suchong tea; in “Patient 103” she observes a man like ‘an image taken / from a Medieval morality tale’ lying on a trolley in a hospital corridor; and in “Lucky to Have a Garden” she observes a mother, absorbed in her smart phone, ignoring her child. We’re back in the park in “London Autumn, 2020”
in the Park, runners move in ghostlike
solitude and at their feet the trees let fall their leaves
in yellow pathways, beckoning towards
an early end to this year’s deadly summer
The next section is titled “Devon, 2021”. Perhaps that’s where the poems were written but there is no explicit reference to Devon in the poems themselves which mostly have a melancholy quality, remembering a dead lover, reflecting on the predicament of a Screech Owl whose death is ‘brought each day closer by her loss of prey’. The poet makes a contrast with her own life:
whereas I promiscuously devour,
then spit out in verse, every, living thing
that comes my way
A recurring motif in this section is the hare (a much mythologised animal) and one of the best poems is called “The Hare” which is accompanied by a delicately drawn image of the animal. The poem proceeds by defining what a hare is not:
A hare isn’t always in a trap
or hanging from a butcher’s hook.
It isn’t always being jugged, or stewed,
nor does it have to be a symbol for something else,
a fairy story, or a girl gone mad…
and ends with a plea to the reader, to ‘Take yourself out of the picture. Leave her free / to race beyond the snare of your words.’
The next sequence is called “Death” and features a full-page illustration of a crow. It has a somewhat apocalyptic air, dealing with various deaths of animals and people and possibly the planet. The first poem recounts “The Grief of Crows” who make a racket in response to a fox snatching a fledging from the ground and making off with it in its jaws. There are some excellent poems in this section, especially “Paper Boy”, a very well observed piece about a paper-boy who speedily delivers the news: ‘Job done, he’s off, / like he’s running from the scene of some crime, / shoulder-bag packed with rape, war and death – ‘ And then one day the boy makes the mistake of actually looking at the news and sees: ‘a child, much his own age, dark and skinny, / cradling the debris of a tiny body in his lap’.
“At the Door of The Whitechapel Mission” is a very moving poem about the death of the poet’s father. It has a brilliant opening:
My father and I both had name-tapes
sewn into our socks. Me, for boarding-school
where I was to be turned into a lady. My father
to go into a Care Home. To be turned into…
‘Socks’ I said to the young woman at the door.
Later there is the disposal of the deceased’s clothes to charity shops, but when it comes to the socks: ‘they’ve still got his name on / and I’m finding it difficult to hand them over.’
The final section is, although titled “Grief”, focused more on the consolations of nature, such as “The Ecstasy of Thrushes” : ‘above us it hurls its thrilling leitmotif, / the same in storm, in lust or grief’ or in “In Case This Never Comes Again”: ‘…the woods know something / we’ve forgotten. Having come back from death / so many times, they have refused their own extinction.’
To sum up, London Pastoral contains many highly effective poems that repay attention. A few times I felt there was a use of serendipitous internal or random end-line rhyming, which marred some of the lines, and would have been better edited out. A few of the poems came across as trying too hard, lapsing into a rather old-fashioned syntax that made them sound portentous, such as “In Case This Never Comes Again”: ‘keep, keep in memory deep / the flowers and the berries’ or ‘your sweet lovers’ sleep wherein you spin / the self-made fate that’s dancing you’. The more idiomatic poems are much more successful. However, these are minor quibbles and the collection as a whole is accomplished and well-worth reading.