Poetry review – EMERGENCY DREAM: Pat Edwards admires the way that Polly Atkin’s poetry links the personal with wider societal and global issues
Emergency Dream
Polly Atkin
Seren
ISBN 978-1-78172-795-9
£10.99
This book is described as having three significant strands – the social, political, and personal emergencies that Atkin chooses to highlight in her collection. It may be fairly easy for many readers to share her concerns about the state of our current politics and about the climate crisis. But perhaps not everyone will so readily relate to issues of Disability Justice if they do not have direct experience; so this book may go some way to educating and drawing attention to what it is to live with chronic illness.
That five of the poems carry the word pain in their titles tells us something about the poet’s intention to alert the reader to the reality of being in pain, of what it is to carry this, hide it, manage it, or encounter it in others. In society, pain is often talked about in terms of being on a sliding scale, certainly of being perceived differently by each individual, in that tolerance of it is a variable.
The first poem hits us with the notion that some people have never been healthy, by using the trope that health is a country, “but I have never been there/ not seen it, not even from a distance.” I suppose the point is that the reverse is not true – healthy people will likely have been ill at some point, even if all they’ve had was a bit of a cold or the toothache – but many sick people have literally never been without illness, don’t know what it is to be totally free of symptoms. This is surely an interesting starting point from which to explore, and its potential to act as metaphor is fascinating.
Atkin recalls childhood and the realisation that her limbs do not work as those of other children her age. In ‘Flying in Dreams’ she speculates:
I must try harder. If I run faster,
recover the correct articulation of limbs,
I could rise, keep rising, stay up forever.
As a child, and later in adulthood, she is entranced by nature. The poet finds solace in the landscape, its flora, and fauna. She also uses this to conjure imagery for what can be so easily lost – habitats, species, ways of living, seasonal norms. Atkin writes passionately about owls, trees, the weather. In ‘Inclement Weather for Immortal Hags’, these lines:
We go out
to move our blood. We meet three deer
on the common. We see a giant raven
carrying sticks in their beak. At the top
of our tiny world, a sun blinks
through cloud.
Atkin often says that she feels most comfortable when close to animals. In ‘Prey Animals’, “the deer/are the only ones I care to be with “, even though she feels “unworthy, clumsy.” She fears that they will “be culled”, and could it be there is a sense she is hinting that this might be the dystopian fate of those who burden society, “is it because they smell/your gathering weakness?”
In ‘Frog Song’ the poet also finds comfort in “a cool/scarf of water drawn over [her] body” and in “the relief of sun/on [her] face.” This visceral appreciation of all the natural world has to offer, and her own ironic admission that she “was born sensitive,” only increases the guilt about what we are doing to destroy the environment. The title poem of the collection, ‘Emergency Dream’, longs for a time when it is “always autumn”, a time before the end, where we can dare to dream that “all of us get to thrive.” This style of writing is a common thread throughout the work, an almost undetectable fusion melding thoughts about personal circumstances, wider politics, and the climate emergency. Another such example is ‘Silver Birch’. At what point is the writing about a “delicate, bone white” tree, someone ageing, shedding their skin, or the state of the world? Likewise in ‘The Owls Have Words’,
I mistook her jawbone
for a wishbone as though
she could snap some thought
into being by speaking.
Who is doing the wishing and what do they wish for? Who is speaking and for whom? Who is making mistakes and what are they?
Do people who are ill give in to their symptoms and just accept their situation? Maybe sometimes they need to, have to, or they will go mad? But the idea that the sick, disabled, chronically ill can accept without full capitulation is evident in ‘Resolving’:
I will weather these months as the deer do, eating
and resting when I will. Putting all of my store
into personal growth, turning the winter
into velvet and bone, and my own survival.
Many poems refer to having your “face in the sun”, another intriguing play between the joy and healing power of warmth on our skin, and rising world temperatures. Positivity is hard for any of us to maintain, so imagine the struggle when you are living with hidden or unseen pain? And how much worse is this during a time of pandemic? ‘Declaration/Plague Year Season 4’ is a most powerful and life-affirming poem:
I am
as important as the most important of people
you think of as precious to you are. Precious
as the rarest of orchids. As the most charismatic
of megafauna, extinct or at risk,
the ones you would save, the ones you would clone…
I have no intention of surrendering
the bramble of my precious life
There are poems too in this collection which are about writing and the role of poetry (clearly, also not just about this) – ‘The Private Life of the Poet’, ‘Frog Song’, ‘Notebooks’, ‘Critics’, ‘True Poetry’. Writing is important as a tool to express love, anger, purpose, and as an almanac. Atkin weaves the owl, the cat, pain and seasons into this literary calendar, mapping the passage of time and the inevitable changes in mood and wellness. Sometimes she even embodies the creatures. How sad is the poem ‘Burying the Cat,’ “I was the animal/who needed to hold her body to believe/she was gone.”
It’s interesting isn’t it, what we think we know at any given time? The years roll by and suddenly it’s old news and hard to believe things happened and we lived through events. There’s also the possibility that we failed to act, failed to do the right thing. ‘The Book of Retreat’ is a wonderful manifestation of this:
In the years to come, when everything’s happened,
we’ll see the pattern. We’ll know it as vision.
We’ll say we knew all along.
Perhaps as testament to this Atkin closes the collection very much in the here and now. She urges us – well, more accurately, she addresses disabled protestors – to “lie down and let yourself rise as you fall.” Even more significantly, she declares “the conditions/of my body are incurable as entropy. The conditions/of society are not.” She entertains the “promise of belonging to a more splendid world.”
So, if health is a country, this collection takes us around its topography, reminding us of the better days as well as the ones that can only be endured. The overwhelming take-away is the power of nature to emulate our struggle, offer us hope and security, teach us resilience, and offer inspiration. There may well be lots still to do but Atkin is a fine companion telling us “Be flower. Be flourish. Be much. Be more.”
Jun 14 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Polly Atkin
Poetry review – EMERGENCY DREAM: Pat Edwards admires the way that Polly Atkin’s poetry links the personal with wider societal and global issues
Emergency Dream
Polly Atkin
Seren
ISBN 978-1-78172-795-9
£10.99
This book is described as having three significant strands – the social, political, and personal emergencies that Atkin chooses to highlight in her collection. It may be fairly easy for many readers to share her concerns about the state of our current politics and about the climate crisis. But perhaps not everyone will so readily relate to issues of Disability Justice if they do not have direct experience; so this book may go some way to educating and drawing attention to what it is to live with chronic illness.
That five of the poems carry the word pain in their titles tells us something about the poet’s intention to alert the reader to the reality of being in pain, of what it is to carry this, hide it, manage it, or encounter it in others. In society, pain is often talked about in terms of being on a sliding scale, certainly of being perceived differently by each individual, in that tolerance of it is a variable.
The first poem hits us with the notion that some people have never been healthy, by using the trope that health is a country, “but I have never been there/ not seen it, not even from a distance.” I suppose the point is that the reverse is not true – healthy people will likely have been ill at some point, even if all they’ve had was a bit of a cold or the toothache – but many sick people have literally never been without illness, don’t know what it is to be totally free of symptoms. This is surely an interesting starting point from which to explore, and its potential to act as metaphor is fascinating.
Atkin recalls childhood and the realisation that her limbs do not work as those of other children her age. In ‘Flying in Dreams’ she speculates:
I must try harder. If I run faster,
recover the correct articulation of limbs,
I could rise, keep rising, stay up forever.
As a child, and later in adulthood, she is entranced by nature. The poet finds solace in the landscape, its flora, and fauna. She also uses this to conjure imagery for what can be so easily lost – habitats, species, ways of living, seasonal norms. Atkin writes passionately about owls, trees, the weather. In ‘Inclement Weather for Immortal Hags’, these lines:
We go out
to move our blood. We meet three deer
on the common. We see a giant raven
carrying sticks in their beak. At the top
of our tiny world, a sun blinks
through cloud.
Atkin often says that she feels most comfortable when close to animals. In ‘Prey Animals’, “the deer/are the only ones I care to be with “, even though she feels “unworthy, clumsy.” She fears that they will “be culled”, and could it be there is a sense she is hinting that this might be the dystopian fate of those who burden society, “is it because they smell/your gathering weakness?”
In ‘Frog Song’ the poet also finds comfort in “a cool/scarf of water drawn over [her] body” and in “the relief of sun/on [her] face.” This visceral appreciation of all the natural world has to offer, and her own ironic admission that she “was born sensitive,” only increases the guilt about what we are doing to destroy the environment. The title poem of the collection, ‘Emergency Dream’, longs for a time when it is “always autumn”, a time before the end, where we can dare to dream that “all of us get to thrive.” This style of writing is a common thread throughout the work, an almost undetectable fusion melding thoughts about personal circumstances, wider politics, and the climate emergency. Another such example is ‘Silver Birch’. At what point is the writing about a “delicate, bone white” tree, someone ageing, shedding their skin, or the state of the world? Likewise in ‘The Owls Have Words’,
I mistook her jawbone
for a wishbone as though
she could snap some thought
into being by speaking.
Who is doing the wishing and what do they wish for? Who is speaking and for whom? Who is making mistakes and what are they?
Do people who are ill give in to their symptoms and just accept their situation? Maybe sometimes they need to, have to, or they will go mad? But the idea that the sick, disabled, chronically ill can accept without full capitulation is evident in ‘Resolving’:
I will weather these months as the deer do, eating
and resting when I will. Putting all of my store
into personal growth, turning the winter
into velvet and bone, and my own survival.
Many poems refer to having your “face in the sun”, another intriguing play between the joy and healing power of warmth on our skin, and rising world temperatures. Positivity is hard for any of us to maintain, so imagine the struggle when you are living with hidden or unseen pain? And how much worse is this during a time of pandemic? ‘Declaration/Plague Year Season 4’ is a most powerful and life-affirming poem:
I am
as important as the most important of people
you think of as precious to you are. Precious
as the rarest of orchids. As the most charismatic
of megafauna, extinct or at risk,
the ones you would save, the ones you would clone…
I have no intention of surrendering
the bramble of my precious life
There are poems too in this collection which are about writing and the role of poetry (clearly, also not just about this) – ‘The Private Life of the Poet’, ‘Frog Song’, ‘Notebooks’, ‘Critics’, ‘True Poetry’. Writing is important as a tool to express love, anger, purpose, and as an almanac. Atkin weaves the owl, the cat, pain and seasons into this literary calendar, mapping the passage of time and the inevitable changes in mood and wellness. Sometimes she even embodies the creatures. How sad is the poem ‘Burying the Cat,’ “I was the animal/who needed to hold her body to believe/she was gone.”
It’s interesting isn’t it, what we think we know at any given time? The years roll by and suddenly it’s old news and hard to believe things happened and we lived through events. There’s also the possibility that we failed to act, failed to do the right thing. ‘The Book of Retreat’ is a wonderful manifestation of this:
In the years to come, when everything’s happened,
we’ll see the pattern. We’ll know it as vision.
We’ll say we knew all along.
Perhaps as testament to this Atkin closes the collection very much in the here and now. She urges us – well, more accurately, she addresses disabled protestors – to “lie down and let yourself rise as you fall.” Even more significantly, she declares “the conditions/of my body are incurable as entropy. The conditions/of society are not.” She entertains the “promise of belonging to a more splendid world.”
So, if health is a country, this collection takes us around its topography, reminding us of the better days as well as the ones that can only be endured. The overwhelming take-away is the power of nature to emulate our struggle, offer us hope and security, teach us resilience, and offer inspiration. There may well be lots still to do but Atkin is a fine companion telling us “Be flower. Be flourish. Be much. Be more.”