Poetry review – THESE YELLOW DAYS: Jennifer Johnson examines an atmospheric and intriguing collection by Kitty Hawkins
These Yellow Days
Kitty Hawkins
Two Rivers Press
ISBN 9781915048257
48pp £11.99
Kitty Hawkins is a young poet who has already won two prizes for a previous collection Acoustics which she wrote as an undergraduate. She has also received an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, a course highly rated among poets. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that this collection is impressive. The book is divided into four sections, and rather than making general comments, I will consider one poem in each section in some detail. I hope this will show the interest and quality of the writing which has been carefully considered and sharpened by its lack of padding.
I’ll begin with the title poem “These Yellow Days” which appears near the end of the book. It begins ‘You dig me bluebells from the house with the yellow drive/and the grey man offers you a bucket and trowel’. The bluebells can symbolise constancy and are sometimes associated with fairy enchantments. Yellow here, I think, has positive connotations such as creativity and communication. However, the end of this idealized adulthood is hinted at as early as the fourth line of the poem when we are told that ‘the yellow brick-weave got tarmac-ed’. This loss of yellow is further picked up in the lines
I wanted today to go so well for you, to be what we call
a yellow day like the ones we plan before sleep.
But I’ll deadhead the flowers instead.
Adulthood has to change into something more survivable which leads to the concluding line of the poem ‘Next year their two buds will be ferocious’.
In the first section of the book there is a most unusual poem about death. This is “Imagining Her Death” which begins ‘When my mother dies I’ll scrape the earth from her grave/and climb inside.’ The thought of the death of the mother seems to haunt the poem’s narrator, resulting in changed perceptions. The poem continues ‘If she thrusts me back out/am I a girl again?’ and a few lines later ‘There are fruits on the raspberry bush/and bloody flowers spilling into a long dusk.’ This continues in the following lines,
Do we all become the woman
we swore we would escape?
I search for an answer among the sparrows
finding nothing but soil and worms.
The sparrows do not find the ‘fruits on the raspberry bush’ mentioned earlier but only ‘soil and worms’ which perhaps corresponds to the speaker’s realisation that if she does become her mother she too will die.
In the second section there is a poem in four parts called “Witching under an Honest Moon”. The title recalls Hamlet when he says ‘Tis now the very witching time of night,/When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes/out Contagion to this world’. The honest moon is a symbol of the divine feminine showing cyclical birth, growth, death and rebirth. Conscious and subconscious darkness can be illuminated by such a moon. Part one of this poem ends with a surprise that when the body is pulled from the reeds it turns out to be ‘the sausage-dog balloon from my fifth birthday party’. In fact the scene has been set earlier for something more sinister than this, for instance in the line ‘The water is dredged, and her body is pulled’. The section ends with ‘It was a man who tied her up’ showing the reader that they might consider the body in the water as simultaneously being both a victim and a toy. The second section continues the balloon image in the context of spacemen whose ‘floating helmets become balloons as well’. This is seen on ‘the podcast we’re obsessed with’ emphasising the narrative distance from the first section. The balloons in the third section are literal as in ‘we’ll take our balloons to the carnival’. The section, however, begins with something more magical.
University, kitchen floor,
Onion skin in a sacred circle.
Our purple fingertips wait for a tilt in the air.
Like the moon in the first section, the sacred circle symbolises the cyclical nature of life. The group leaves the protective sacred circle and moves into the crowd that results in ‘crushing our frames against the fairground swarm.’ In the fourth section we are told that the exhausted students will dress their bodies ‘for covenant’. The poem ends with seeing ‘On a sketch of the horizon white horses dance.’ These white horses may symbolize a spiritual change from the darkness at the beginning of the poem to an illumination by the presence of a divine power.
The moon is also present in the first poem of the third section, this time ‘a super-flower-blood moon’. The poem begins with the experience many poets have had in which a phrase is ‘loitering on the tip of my tongue’. In this case the phrase is ‘tall grass burning’ which is used as the poem’s title. This suggested lack of control contrasts with the restraint shown in the following lines.
A yellow-spotted spider wanders onto my forearm and I resist
the urge
to flick her. Se too is a creature of feelings. I, invader of her home.
The following lines might suggest a woman missing her partner who is ‘on the west coast’. ‘Above me, dragonflies mate, a sky a stage for their fleeting romance/if that’s what we want to call sex.’ The persona pictures what her partner is doing: ‘I imagine you, second-hand/binoculars/bottle of day-old water uncapped, food for nearby bushes.’ The moon is brought back in at the end ‘The moon blushes when she notices you watching/her crimson light colouring you rust’, rust possibly implying a loss of vitality caused by the separation from his partner.
These Yellow Days is a collection that makes you feel you’ve been stimulated by an enriching experience. I look forward to reading more in the future from this very promising young writer who shows so much vitality and originality. The publisher, Two Rivers Press, must also be congratulated for a first-rate production which adds to the pleasure of reading.
Nov 2 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Kitty Hawkins
Poetry review – THESE YELLOW DAYS: Jennifer Johnson examines an atmospheric and intriguing collection by Kitty Hawkins
Kitty Hawkins is a young poet who has already won two prizes for a previous collection Acoustics which she wrote as an undergraduate. She has also received an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, a course highly rated among poets. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that this collection is impressive. The book is divided into four sections, and rather than making general comments, I will consider one poem in each section in some detail. I hope this will show the interest and quality of the writing which has been carefully considered and sharpened by its lack of padding.
I’ll begin with the title poem “These Yellow Days” which appears near the end of the book. It begins ‘You dig me bluebells from the house with the yellow drive/and the grey man offers you a bucket and trowel’. The bluebells can symbolise constancy and are sometimes associated with fairy enchantments. Yellow here, I think, has positive connotations such as creativity and communication. However, the end of this idealized adulthood is hinted at as early as the fourth line of the poem when we are told that ‘the yellow brick-weave got tarmac-ed’. This loss of yellow is further picked up in the lines
Adulthood has to change into something more survivable which leads to the concluding line of the poem ‘Next year their two buds will be ferocious’.
In the first section of the book there is a most unusual poem about death. This is “Imagining Her Death” which begins ‘When my mother dies I’ll scrape the earth from her grave/and climb inside.’ The thought of the death of the mother seems to haunt the poem’s narrator, resulting in changed perceptions. The poem continues ‘If she thrusts me back out/am I a girl again?’ and a few lines later ‘There are fruits on the raspberry bush/and bloody flowers spilling into a long dusk.’ This continues in the following lines,
The sparrows do not find the ‘fruits on the raspberry bush’ mentioned earlier but only ‘soil and worms’ which perhaps corresponds to the speaker’s realisation that if she does become her mother she too will die.
In the second section there is a poem in four parts called “Witching under an Honest Moon”. The title recalls Hamlet when he says ‘Tis now the very witching time of night,/When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes/out Contagion to this world’. The honest moon is a symbol of the divine feminine showing cyclical birth, growth, death and rebirth. Conscious and subconscious darkness can be illuminated by such a moon. Part one of this poem ends with a surprise that when the body is pulled from the reeds it turns out to be ‘the sausage-dog balloon from my fifth birthday party’. In fact the scene has been set earlier for something more sinister than this, for instance in the line ‘The water is dredged, and her body is pulled’. The section ends with ‘It was a man who tied her up’ showing the reader that they might consider the body in the water as simultaneously being both a victim and a toy. The second section continues the balloon image in the context of spacemen whose ‘floating helmets become balloons as well’. This is seen on ‘the podcast we’re obsessed with’ emphasising the narrative distance from the first section. The balloons in the third section are literal as in ‘we’ll take our balloons to the carnival’. The section, however, begins with something more magical.
Like the moon in the first section, the sacred circle symbolises the cyclical nature of life. The group leaves the protective sacred circle and moves into the crowd that results in ‘crushing our frames against the fairground swarm.’ In the fourth section we are told that the exhausted students will dress their bodies ‘for covenant’. The poem ends with seeing ‘On a sketch of the horizon white horses dance.’ These white horses may symbolize a spiritual change from the darkness at the beginning of the poem to an illumination by the presence of a divine power.
The moon is also present in the first poem of the third section, this time ‘a super-flower-blood moon’. The poem begins with the experience many poets have had in which a phrase is ‘loitering on the tip of my tongue’. In this case the phrase is ‘tall grass burning’ which is used as the poem’s title. This suggested lack of control contrasts with the restraint shown in the following lines.
A yellow-spotted spider wanders onto my forearm and I resist the urge to flick her. Se too is a creature of feelings. I, invader of her home.The following lines might suggest a woman missing her partner who is ‘on the west coast’. ‘Above me, dragonflies mate, a sky a stage for their fleeting romance/if that’s what we want to call sex.’ The persona pictures what her partner is doing: ‘I imagine you, second-hand/binoculars/bottle of day-old water uncapped, food for nearby bushes.’ The moon is brought back in at the end ‘The moon blushes when she notices you watching/her crimson light colouring you rust’, rust possibly implying a loss of vitality caused by the separation from his partner.
These Yellow Days is a collection that makes you feel you’ve been stimulated by an enriching experience. I look forward to reading more in the future from this very promising young writer who shows so much vitality and originality. The publisher, Two Rivers Press, must also be congratulated for a first-rate production which adds to the pleasure of reading.