Black Bough Poetry
Book of the Month
July 2025​​
Our July 2025 Book of the Month is 'Heronless' by Sophia Argyris (Palewell Press), review by Victoria Spires
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Sophia Argyris is an accomplished poet, whose new pamphlet 'Heronless' (Palewell Press) comes after a full collection How Do the Parakeets Stay Green? (Indigo Dreams) and a previous pamphlet 'Strange Longing for a Monday' (Erbacce Press). Her work has been widely published and placed in competitions, including the Verve Eco Poetry Competition, the Plough Prize, and just recently the Poetry Wales Award. In short, Argyris is very much a poet at the top of her game, and 'Heronless' sees her tackle big themes with her characteristically exacting language and emotional intelligence.
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At its heart, this collection is about grief: how it swallows us, and how we swallow it, live with it inside of us. The poems go spelunking through the spaces where grief finds us, from the intimate and everyday to the planetary.
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One of the stand-out poems for me is 'Αγάπη, or How Caves Love You'. Αγάπη or Agapi is the Greek for empathy or universal love. Having heard Sophia read this poem in a video she shared a little while ago, I love how it puts us literally within the body of a cave – its lungs, its “wide open” heart. The poem confesses, “In our clutching world to be so agape is terrifying”. The play on agape/agapi continues,
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“ … last time I stepped inside the earth
its throat was not as I'd thought. I took a pinch
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of darkness between my fingers and let it dissolve
on my tongue. It didn't taste of anything expected.”
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Cave mouths feature in other poems, too. In 'Gaia', we are told of a time before humans, when
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“... another syllable existed, so huge
no human vocal cord could survive it.
It's still spoken by the mouths of caves…” ('Gaia')
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There is an exploration of how our planet holds us, consoles us in our private griefs, even as we mourn and come to terms with the fact that this same planet is also dying, at our own hands. The comforting solidity of the earth is still there, in its quietly accepting caves, its “stooped spines / of mountains” ('My Father as the Planet'), but for how much longer?
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“Rain. Apples. Bodies. They all fall.
Tree hearts and reservoir levels.
The bench in the garden, its splintering legs.”
('Faltering Bodies')
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These poems remind us that we are all faltering bodies, and will all eventually fall. Many of them deal movingly and directly with the loss of a parent, how it untethers us from all that was familiar.
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One of the most devastating of these, 'Some Sunday', paints grief viscerally, as
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“a jawing where there should
be flight. The missing
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of you chews until
something in me breaks
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and loss is too big
to swallow, too strange
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to taste.”
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Argyris plays with presence and absence very effectively through her work, showing us how absence itself can become a presence with us – something tangible, weighty. Two poems at the centre of the collection bring this to life particularly vividly. The titular poem, 'Heronless', is full of the presence of a missing heron, one that is looked for and longed for as an omen, something to lend strength to difficult days. Herons are a favourite talisman of many poets, and my heart was with the narrator as we looked for “his long-legged / careful presence”, his “sharp beaked swiftness / keen concentrated stillness”. In 'Hawkmoth', we are gifted the brief, ephemeral presence of this “tired and tilted” creature as “a held breath”, before “the tangible loss of the weight of him”. Another pair of poems that close out the book, 'Scots Pine' and 'Oak-Hearted', handle ideas of remembering and forgetting, with equal understatement and poise.
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Argyris is at her best when she takes the smallest details of a lived-life (human, or animal) and blows them wide open – shows us the gaps within, and opens up a space for us to climb in and have a look around. In 'The Trick Is Not Minding That It Hurts', we flit between the bright, vivid particulars of the present – the “late furnace” of September heat, the “messy excavations” of badgers, the “military inspection” of a bumblebee. These details are presented as they are, in all their momentary and joyful specificity. This is contrasted with the unchanging, ever-present knowledge of those who are gone, and how we can reconcile those two states.
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In a sense, reconciling opposites is the work of the poet – or indeed the work of the human, full stop. We are always living with contradiction – nothing we love has neat, finite edges. In 'Years with Blue Mother' and 'Skye', we are again shown how joy and sadness coexist, both in the present and in memory.
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“ … I shrank into my smallest shape
but I was growing all the time. I’m still
wishing you happy. I’m still hoping
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to find a cure.”
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('Years with Blue Mother')
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This is work that takes a deep and unflinching look at the messiness of life and what it takes to survive it:
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“I never thought of courage at the time
yours or mine, or the solitary thrust of a life”
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('Skye')
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I find it hard to liken Argyris’ work to that of another poet – her voice is sober, curious, precise and non-judgmental. Her work both holds me and lets me experience what it is to fall – an experience I find deeply satisfying, as a reader. Her poems open up thoughts and feelings within me that linger after I have turned the page, and that is their quiet power.
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Guest review by Victoria Spires, author of 'Soi-même' (Salò Press)​​​​​. Victoria lives in Northampton, UK. She is a contributing editor at The Winged Moon magazine. When not writing, she can be found running or crouching down looking at something interesting. Find her on Bluesky @victoriaspires.bsky.social and Instagram @victoriaspires_poetry.
Black Bough Poetry
Book of the Month
May 2025
Review by Matthew M. C. Smith
One of the literary events of this year, at least in environmental writing, will be the publication of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin books)
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If I’m totally honest, I approached buying and reading this book with some apprehension. I didn’t rush out and get it at first (not for a whole week!) as I wondered whether I would love it as much as I love the Cambridge scholar's other work. I didn’t read many previews or reviews. That’s what happens sometimes when you loved the last book.
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As the editor of Black Bough poetry, I spent a year editing two anthologies Deep Time 1 and 2, inspired by the epic, subterranean journeys described in Underland (2019) and this work is my favourite piece of nature writing, eclipsing Roger Deakin’s Waterlog and Wildwood and works by Jim Perrin and Barry Lopez (sometimes, I think I prefer Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind over Underland and then I change my mind). Underland, with its 15 or so sections depicting different journeys over 452 pages, is a masterpiece of a poetic travelogue encompassing dangerous, claustrophobic routes underground, deep introspection, fears over the climate crisis and explorations of myths and rituals of the past.
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Is a River Alive? runs at a still-weighty 302 pages, and is arguably a really tough act to follow after Underland, a bit like a football team winning the triple one year and facing crushing expectations (note: Macfarlane has published work between these two significant studies).
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If you’re expecting Underland mark 2, you’re going to be surprised. Is a River Alive? is a very different work in its structure and is a paradigm-shift in many ways, despite the familiar stamp of Robert Macfarlane’s writing style. It is far more political, on the whole less poetic-mythical, reflecting the writer’s increasing focus on activism in recent years, whether this is in regards to genocide, the heavy pollution of rivers or unnecessary tree felling in cities. There are more human characters, an array of eccentric, extremely harmless people obsessed with tree sounds and mycelium and snake wrangling and there's a lot more dialogue through the book. Macfarlane's children make numerous appearances (my kids would literally run out of the book) and we get treated to lyrics by his folk musician friend Johnny Flynn. Why not? It's his book, for chrissake.
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The work takes us to four main locations – a mountainous region of Ecuador that was at risk of heavy mining, a heavily polluted region in India, a tribal land in Nitassinan/ Canada damaged by hydroelectric projects, and the author’s local landscape in Cambridgeshire, which is affected by seasonal drought and development. The scope, in terms of number of areas studied, has narrowed, and there is, instead. an extended treatment of each of these areas.
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This was surprising, for me at least. I was expecting discussion of polluted water and sewage in English rivers, as seen on Macfarlane's social media. National issues are mentioned reasonably briefly with activists, such as Feargal Sharkey, getting a name check. This book is not, however, centred on the river sewage crisis in Britain as might be expected. Instead, we are presented with a series of landscapes and rivers from other countries to show what can happen when sustainable development is utterly compromised, environments are destroyed and rivers, that are such a vital source of life, die.
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The most interesting, and refreshing part of this work, for me, is its awareness of animism – how as human beings we invest human qualities in rivers and other natural forms and how this can be limiting, directed by our imaginative faculties. I fist pumped this because of my own frustrations with nature writing. Often, I feel nature and eco-writing cannot escape the confines of human thought and language - and that their otherness is never adequately addressed, even attempted. Nature can become domesticated, overly-humanised, as if it is there to serve the creative whims of the human onlooker. Macfarlane's book does not struggle with this problem but does explore and play around with metaphors, recognizing this as a human trait and, always, subjective activity. That self awareness is intrinsic to this writer.​ So Macfarlane resists, or is at least highly aware of, gendering or humanizing rivers (remember Keir Starmer's memorable recent description of a country as being 'she'. By the way, who else flinches when people refer to a boat as 'she'? Please no!)
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The work also explores how we can have a narrow view of what it means to actually be ‘alive’. So, this is not just a book about science, ecology, environmental exploitation and ruin but is focuses on the power of language in how it shapes our interpretation of nature, our sense of reality and our notion of what 'living' means; furthermore, how it shapes laws that can eventually protect nature.
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At times, my rationalism took over and I thought, hang-on, rivers are, at their most basic, H20. They contain and carry life (i.e. organisms) but they do not actually live. They are a liquid state - but, as mentioned, this work suggests this notion of what it means to ‘live’ is very narrow and there are suggestions that rivers do have some kind of agency. This remains a lingering mystery in the book with no deterministic conclusion.
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Macfarlane is highly aware, then, of the human, animist tendency and recognises its potential in ensuring that rivers, like humans, have rights. For some cultures, animism is deeply rooted in myth, folklore and different religions but pragmatically it serves an important legal purpose in protection and he gives various amazing examples of tribes and communities who have beat corporation and government power. If a river (or a forest) is seen in almost-human terms, this can result in its conservation and survival. The work, therefore, shows us the potential for elevating the status of rivers in all cultures, not least the potential for this in the UK.
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There’s a restless churning of ideas through this frequently evocative work. There’s always an appealing earnestness to Macfarlane’s writing, an idealism at work that is infectious with the reader and encourages hope, bewilderment and plenty of daydreaming but the narrative doesn’t ever cloy, or get too sentimental. When a tribal writer tells Macfarlane to put down his fieldnotes so he can just experience the wild, this was an endearing touch, showing how writers themselves can consume or use nature and should have primary experience unhindered by their vocation or ambitions. I also appreciated random references to Star Wars and other aspects of popular culture and the occasional bit of silliness to give the book some lightness and boot neoromanticism into touch.
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If a second edition were to be possible in the future, I would love to see an increased focus on British rivers. I can see why it would be a sensible choice to avoid too much of a focus on the UK because the issue of high levels of sewage in rivers is relatively recent and activism and awareness still on the rise with water companies largely unchallenged. Macfarlane has also covered British rivers in his previous books. Nevertheless, perhaps something for the future paperback release?
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This is, of course, a brilliant work that shows sustained attention to language and is fiercely intellectual without the posturing of some other prominent nature writers. We've all read works where the egoist nature writer strides out in tweed and muddy boots elbowing everyone out the way to flex their vocabulary and superior knowledge, waxing lyrical about wrens or kingfishers, or snow-capped peaks, banging out all the cliches we've ever heard. Not here, thank god. I appreciated the endnotes and references to other texts. This, again, is honest work, when some nature writers want to pretend the ideas presented are almost entirely their own.
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There are numerous passages in Is a River Alive? which go beyond the power of a cascade to the fury of the rapid, not least * that * ending, which is devastating in its power. I finished the book in a day and was sad to finish it, a book that is a page-turner.
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Congratulations Robert Macfarlane and best wishes as you travel out there and share this important work.
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~ Dr Matthew M C Smith is the author of The Keeper of Aeons and 'Paviland: Ice and Fire' and the editor of Black Bough poetry
