Poetry review – BELIEVING IN THE PLANET: Alwyn Marriage welcomes a new collection by Myra Schneider, dealing with many themes from the environmental to the personal
Believing in the Planet
Myra Schneider
Poetry Space Ltd, 2024
ISBN 978-1-909404-55-7
74 pages £9.95.
Myra’ Schneider’s latest poetry collection, Believing in the Planet, brings together some of her long-held loves and concerns in a rich mix of ekphrastic, personal and environmental poetry.
In the first of the four sections of the book, we are faced with the poet’s deep concern over climate change and the continued harm that is being wreaked on our environment by human beings; and this contrasts sharply with her delight in all aspects of the natural world. It is fitting that in the first poem in the book, “Poseidon”, we come face to face with the sea god’s fury at what humanity has done to the ocean and the marine creatures to which it is home.
The earth, as well as the sea, suffers from the insensitivity of humans, as we see from Schneider’s passing comment about the harm done by the transformation of front gardens into hard impermeable surfaces. The poem “Hardwicke’s Woolly Bat” ends with the poignant words:
Where can we curl up and sleep safe from fear
in this world we're continually wounding?
Where indeed?
However, all is not negative. Schneider has a particular love of birds and in one of the poems she takes us with her as she describes – and almost herself becomes – a gannet as ‘it nosedives into a savage sea’ . She also describes plants with a joyful originality: ‘the spiked heads / of alliums which, when they’re dead, look like tiny planets’ and ‘the cool of trees healing the car-polluted air’ .
Part Two includes a number of ekphrastic poems that focus on well-known works of art, including Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ (which makes at least two appearances) and works by Matisse, Paul Nash, Chris Holley and the nature artist Annie Soudain, to whom I was pleased to be introduced for the first time.
There are still some personal references in this section, including hints that the poet occasionally suffers from dizzy spells, plus a charming representation of her practising Qi Gong . Another poem in this section, “The Three Trees”, hints at memories of a less than entirely happy home life as a teenager, when a ring of beeches on a Sussex hill recalls her visiting such a place when she was young and recognising it as
a place where I felt safe from the angers
always threatening to explode at home
There is also a vivid evocation of fear, remembered from a childhood encounter with turkeys when ‘terror clamped my body’. It is possible that this one might have fitted more naturally into Part One, but that is just a reflection, not a criticism.
Part Three comprises two longer poems: first the 12-part “Hildegard”, which traces the life of the mystic, starting with her childhood and including the pain of homesickness as an eighteen-year old nun and her experiences of the illness that sometimes accompanied her visions. The content of her visions was not always benign:
When she opens the door
cold rushes at her, frost bites into her body
and she gasps when fiery flames suddenly descend
from the sky. The red tongues pierce her brain
but they don't burn.
We also learn about the challenges Hildegard sometimes had to face from recalcitrant clergy including an Abbot and an Archbishop.
The second long poem in this section recounts the story of the 17th century artist, Artemesia Gentileschi, who overcame some of the misogyny of an art world that did not countenance the idea that a woman might become a great artist. Viciously raped by the inferior artist who was employed by her father to tutor her, and having to endure the horror of the trial that eventually followed, in which Artemesia herself was sometimes treated as the perpetrator rather than the victim of the crime, Artemesia was later able to vent her anger and revenge in painting her great work, ‘Judith slaying Holofernes’. Schneider’s treatment of this story is powerful and evocative.
Part Four comprises a series of poems entitled “Five views of Mount Fuji”. I do not know whether Schneider has visited Japan or has simply been introduced to its charms through works of art, but these five poems form a beautiful final section of the book. We are reminded, in case we had forgotten, of the smallness of human beings beside such majestic wonders as Mt Fuji or the splendour of Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’.
This book is rich and varied and exercises the poet’s vivid imagination like a well-used muscle. Sometimes she invites us to join her in flights of fancy, such as when she enjoys a walk with a friend who is about to travel to Ghana. As the friend talks enthusiastically about African fauna, this sets the poet off on her own fantasy:
And there they are: the giraffes, necks jutting
above the traffic as they search the streetlights for foliage
to munch. Beyond them a covey of elephants is trampling
the grassy roundabout at the end of the road, trunks
curled round the bushes and birch trees, ripping them
out of the ground.
On occasions Schneider has a slight tendency to tell too much, where it would have been better to tell less and show more; and there are some odd word splits, such as ‘Face Book’ and ‘blue bells’. But these minor niggles are negligible compared to the delight of her observations and attention to detail in such phrases as ‘a breeze is tickling the sea’ or ‘a black as thick as panther fur’ or her facility with representing different senses such as scent and sight.
In this collection, Schneider brings together a lifetime of poetry and lived experience. There is, consequently, so much beauty and variety in the book that I am sure the reader will return to it again and again.
Nov 22 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Myra Schneider
Poetry review – BELIEVING IN THE PLANET: Alwyn Marriage welcomes a new collection by Myra Schneider, dealing with many themes from the environmental to the personal
Myra’ Schneider’s latest poetry collection, Believing in the Planet, brings together some of her long-held loves and concerns in a rich mix of ekphrastic, personal and environmental poetry.
In the first of the four sections of the book, we are faced with the poet’s deep concern over climate change and the continued harm that is being wreaked on our environment by human beings; and this contrasts sharply with her delight in all aspects of the natural world. It is fitting that in the first poem in the book, “Poseidon”, we come face to face with the sea god’s fury at what humanity has done to the ocean and the marine creatures to which it is home.
The earth, as well as the sea, suffers from the insensitivity of humans, as we see from Schneider’s passing comment about the harm done by the transformation of front gardens into hard impermeable surfaces. The poem “Hardwicke’s Woolly Bat” ends with the poignant words:
Where indeed?
However, all is not negative. Schneider has a particular love of birds and in one of the poems she takes us with her as she describes – and almost herself becomes – a gannet as ‘it nosedives into a savage sea’ . She also describes plants with a joyful originality: ‘the spiked heads / of alliums which, when they’re dead, look like tiny planets’ and ‘the cool of trees healing the car-polluted air’ .
Part Two includes a number of ekphrastic poems that focus on well-known works of art, including Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ (which makes at least two appearances) and works by Matisse, Paul Nash, Chris Holley and the nature artist Annie Soudain, to whom I was pleased to be introduced for the first time.
There are still some personal references in this section, including hints that the poet occasionally suffers from dizzy spells, plus a charming representation of her practising Qi Gong . Another poem in this section, “The Three Trees”, hints at memories of a less than entirely happy home life as a teenager, when a ring of beeches on a Sussex hill recalls her visiting such a place when she was young and recognising it as
There is also a vivid evocation of fear, remembered from a childhood encounter with turkeys when ‘terror clamped my body’. It is possible that this one might have fitted more naturally into Part One, but that is just a reflection, not a criticism.
Part Three comprises two longer poems: first the 12-part “Hildegard”, which traces the life of the mystic, starting with her childhood and including the pain of homesickness as an eighteen-year old nun and her experiences of the illness that sometimes accompanied her visions. The content of her visions was not always benign:
We also learn about the challenges Hildegard sometimes had to face from recalcitrant clergy including an Abbot and an Archbishop.
The second long poem in this section recounts the story of the 17th century artist, Artemesia Gentileschi, who overcame some of the misogyny of an art world that did not countenance the idea that a woman might become a great artist. Viciously raped by the inferior artist who was employed by her father to tutor her, and having to endure the horror of the trial that eventually followed, in which Artemesia herself was sometimes treated as the perpetrator rather than the victim of the crime, Artemesia was later able to vent her anger and revenge in painting her great work, ‘Judith slaying Holofernes’. Schneider’s treatment of this story is powerful and evocative.
Part Four comprises a series of poems entitled “Five views of Mount Fuji”. I do not know whether Schneider has visited Japan or has simply been introduced to its charms through works of art, but these five poems form a beautiful final section of the book. We are reminded, in case we had forgotten, of the smallness of human beings beside such majestic wonders as Mt Fuji or the splendour of Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’.
This book is rich and varied and exercises the poet’s vivid imagination like a well-used muscle. Sometimes she invites us to join her in flights of fancy, such as when she enjoys a walk with a friend who is about to travel to Ghana. As the friend talks enthusiastically about African fauna, this sets the poet off on her own fantasy:
On occasions Schneider has a slight tendency to tell too much, where it would have been better to tell less and show more; and there are some odd word splits, such as ‘Face Book’ and ‘blue bells’. But these minor niggles are negligible compared to the delight of her observations and attention to detail in such phrases as ‘a breeze is tickling the sea’ or ‘a black as thick as panther fur’ or her facility with representing different senses such as scent and sight.
In this collection, Schneider brings together a lifetime of poetry and lived experience. There is, consequently, so much beauty and variety in the book that I am sure the reader will return to it again and again.