Nature poetry. For too long, it’s been the domain of soft-focus sentimentality: predictable scenes of meadows, rivers, and, yes, even gliding gulls. But in The Whiskey Tree: Untamed Nature (Wave 1), poets like Mary Earnshaw, Jay Rafferty, and Matthew M. C. Smith cracked the genre wide open, revealing the grit and raw power beneath the pastoral gloss. With Wave 2, the gloves are not just off—they’re shredded, burned, and left to blow in the wind.
The Whiskey Tree isn’t here to comfort you. It’s here to challenge, to confront, and to shake you out of your boots. This isn’t about pretty landscapes or quaint nostalgia. This is nature with all its teeth bared—beautiful, violent, and indifferent to your feelings. These poets have taken that challenge and run wild, producing work that doesn’t just push boundaries but stomps all over them.
Here’s a look at the fearless voices driving this new wave of untamed poetry.
Lucy Heuschen channels myth and menace in Aerfen, where a girl stands waist-deep in a river, waiting for a ravenous goddess. It’s a tense, primal poem that perfectly captures humanity’s uneasy exchange with forces it cannot control. Building on the foundation laid by Wave 1’s fearless writers, Heuschen strips nature poetry down to its elemental power, showing no pity—only truth.
Mark Antony Owen doesn’t take us to the Sahara; instead, he brings the Sahara to us. When it rained the Sahara recounts the surreal aftermath of a freak weather event in southern England, where storms dragged Saharan sand across the sky, turning rain into something physical and alien. “The sky had never fallen so physically,” he writes, transforming weather into a living force—ominous, unrelenting, and profound. True to the Wave 1 ethos of rejecting sentimentality, Owen’s poem captures nature’s ability to connect and disrupt, showing how the foreign can suddenly feel intimate and overwhelming.
Bex Hainsworth’s Northern Stargazer is all tension and paradox. The predator she conjures is both grounded and celestial, a creature “made of stars” that captures nature’s duality—beautiful yet deadly. Hainsworth pushes beyond Wave 1’s explorations of nature’s contradictions, turning awe into something electric and unsettling.
Jen Feroze takes the themes of destruction and renewal seen in Wave 1 and threads them through a deeply personal lens in Corn Dolly. With phrases like “scattering my dust like a prophecy”, Feroze transforms the pastoral into something mythic and raw. Her work is a masterclass in placing humanity’s fragility within the relentless cycles of the natural world.
Gothic, apocalyptic, and utterly visceral, George Sandifer-Smith’s poem feels like stepping into a dark chasm of the earth itself. He writes of “ink-glass grief” and “moon-crazed folk” with an intensity that builds on Wave 1’s boundary-pushing ethos but plunges even deeper into the sublime and terrifying. This is nature poetry for those who aren’t afraid to feel small.
Damien B. Donnelly dismantles the Edenic illusions of nature poetry with razor-sharp precision. “Eden is not a place of permanence,” he declares, dragging the pastoral ideal into the dirt. His serpentine imagery—“snake songs grow smoother” and “sequined scales shimmer with malice”—makes Wave 2 feel like an unapologetic evolution of The Whiskey Tree’s ethos.
Lesley Curwen finds beauty in the overlooked. In Earth’s gift, she reclaims sand—nature’s most unassuming element—and turns it into a metaphor for resilience and history. This quiet rebellion against grandiosity builds on Wave 1’s tradition of finding poetry in the unexpected and carries it forward with a fiercely understated power.
James McConachie turns an abandoned almond grove into a hymn for nature’s persistence. With vivid lines about “jewelled bees drunk on honey” and wildflowers sprouting in defiance, Els Ametllers builds on Wave 1’s celebration of resilience while exploring the indifference of nature to human neglect. It’s as much a warning as it is a celebration.
Barney Ashton-Bullock isn’t here to hold your hand. His tempestuous Channel Light Vassals throws you into a storm of “suppurating eddies” and “momentary flux.” Like Wave 1’s fiercest voices, Ashton-Bullock doesn’t aim to comfort—he aims to confront, capturing nature’s chaotic energy with theatrical brilliance.
Romina Ramos’s Iberica takes us to the cliffs and caves where nature’s decay and renewal coexist. Her imagery—cliffs holding “small beaches in their wombs”—extends the Wave 1 tradition of tension between solace and danger. Ramos invites readers to immerse themselves in nature’s raw and untamed depths.
Robert Frede Kenter takes the surrealist energy of Wave 1 and turns it up a notch. “Parachuting dandelions” and “wounded life lines” twist nature into shapes that are both haunting and strangely hopeful. Kenter’s work bends reality, showing the resilience hidden in chaos.
Perry Gasteiger’s Immutation is a brutal meditation on survival. A hawk snatching its prey, the snap of bones—this is nature unvarnished and unrelenting. Gasteiger takes the no-holds-barred attitude of Wave 1 and runs with it, crafting a poem that feels like a gut punch.
Robert Edge interrogates humanity’s toxic relationship with nature in The Gift of Absence. His lines—“you seem too stubborn to bend to my will but not too stubborn to change”—echo Wave 1’s reflections on impact and indifference but dig deeper into the paradox of symbiosis. This is poetry that forces uncomfortable truths into the light.
Briony Collins’s Ecotone embodies transformation, blending human and vegetal existence into surreal lines like “dream leaves sprout in the imagination.” Building on Wave 1’s themes of flux, Collins takes it further, making metamorphosis feel both inevitable and otherworldly.
The Whiskey Tree: Untamed Nature (Wave 2) doesn’t just pick up where Wave 1 left off—it amplifies it. These poets have pushed further, dug deeper, and created work that doesn’t ask for permission. This is nature poetry that snarls, stings, and refuses to be tamed.
If you’re ready for something wild, and something real, put the Jaunuary 13th release day in your diary today. But don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Let’s drop the Hallmark card fantasies. Nature isn’t serene. It’s not here to cradle you while you write love letters to daffodils.
Beautiful Little Fools will be a stunning hardcover anthology celebrating and interrogating the glamour, obsession, and decadence of the Gilded Age, inspired
Are you a writer with a winter-themed story waiting to shine? The Broken Spine is seeking submissions for its 2025 Festive Short
The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
