A Year of Nature Poems

‘A Year in Nature Poems‘ offers a calendar year of poems from Joseph Coelho. In painstaking detail, he examines one feature specific to each month. Each subject is introduced with a story, an influence. In January, he shares a seventeenth century Irish legend of warring starlings. Then the poem unfolds, dramatic, explicit and entrancing- ‘their wings have beaten cold into existence’.  

Kelly Louise Judd’s illustrations are both seasonally photographic, and reminiscent of the silhouette forms of Jane Ray. They elevate Joseph Coelho’s visual images to something almost ethereal.

Joseph Coelho employs a range of devices cleverly in his works, including lists (March- daffodils) or metaphor (August- scrumping in the nuns’ garden with ‘guilty knees’ and watching ‘disciples‘.)

There is also a deep nostalgia, not only for the poet’s childhood, and memories, but for something threatened. In February’s focus upon amphibians- ‘We’ve diminished their numbers,/ filled in their forest eyes.’ 

‘A Year of Nature Poems‘ is an outstanding book, one we urge you to read and cherish.