Let’s get one thing straight: poetry isn’t here to fix you. It’s not therapy. It doesn’t hold your hand or whisper pretty lies in your ear about everything being fine. Poetry doesn’t care about your comfort. But what it does—what it’s always done—is build bridges over the fractured mess of life. Poetry doesn’t eliminate the divides between us; it refuses to let us pretend those divides don’t exist. Instead, it makes us stand at the edge, look across the void, and dare us to cross.
And if you’re looking for poetry that makes you feel something real, something unshakable, then you’d better get your hands on The Whiskey Tree: Untamed Nature (Wave 2). This collection does what most contemporary poetry fails to do—it digs into the fault lines of human existence and plants a bridge in the rubble.
Grief isn’t poetic. It’s jagged, ugly, and sharp enough to cut. But somehow, Jen Feroze’s Corn Dolly manages to make grief feel like prophecy—a part of something larger than just one person’s pain.
‘I know the fire is coming, wait for his return, / his huge hands gentle in my unmaking, / scattering my dust like a prophecy over the fields.’
This isn’t grief as a tidy resolution. It’s grief as dismantling, as scattering. The speaker becomes dust, part of the soil, part of the cycle. Personal loss transforms into something collective, something that speaks to the rhythm of life itself. You can’t read this and not feel the weight of it—how your own losses don’t sit in isolation but connect to something vast, something universal.
And here’s the thing: Feroze isn’t giving you a nice, clean moment of catharsis. This isn’t a poem that pats you on the back and tells you it’ll all make sense one day. No. This is poetry that forces you to see grief for what it is—raw, destructive, and entirely necessary. It dares you to cross that emotional chasm and see what’s on the other side.
Here’s an uncomfortable truism: you’re insignificant. The Earth has been doing its thing for billions of years before you showed up, and it’ll keep doing it long after you’re gone. Depressing? Maybe. But also kind of liberating. Lesley Curwen’s Earth’s Gift captures this beautifully.
‘Fine grit that once was cliff or peak / or boulder whose quartz hearts split.’
In this one line, Curwen does something extraordinary. She compresses time. Massive cliffs worn down to grains of sand—millions of years, billions of waves, reduced to a handful of words. And yet, in that reduction, there’s power. The grit beneath your feet is older than you can imagine. The ground you walk on is a record of time itself.
Curwen’s poem forces you to confront the vastness of geological time, but it doesn’t leave you adrift. Instead, it connects you to it. You, the sand, the cliffs, the waves—it’s all part of the same story. That’s the brilliance of this poem: it doesn’t just tell you you’re small; it makes you feel part of something enormous, something eternal.
Now, let’s talk about Bex Hainsworth’s Northern Stargazer. If you’re someone who struggles with the idea of being enough, this one’s for you. The stargazer fish—a strange, lopsided creature lurking in the seabed—isn’t just a metaphor for hidden identity. It’s a symbol of defiance.
‘With flattened tail and blooming body, / she is pear-shaped, possessing the beauty / of the unevenly weighted.’
Hainsworth doesn’t romanticise the stargazer. It’s jagged, awkward, and wholly itself. And that’s the point. The fish doesn’t care if you think it’s beautiful. It doesn’t care if you see its uneven weight as a flaw. It exists, unapologetically, in its own skin (or scales, rather).
This is poetry that doesn’t shy away from imperfection. It leans into it. It challenges you to look at the parts of yourself you’d rather hide—the uneven, the jagged, the too much or not enough—and see them as vital. Hainsworth isn’t asking you to love yourself. She’s asking you to accept yourself, to see the beauty in the uneven weight of your own existence.
Here’s the truth: The Whiskey Tree isn’t trying to please you. It’s not here to entertain or soothe you. It’s here to challenge you. These poems bridge divides—between grief and renewal, between fleeting human lives and geological time, between the hidden self and the visible world. But crossing those bridges isn’t easy.
What this collection does—what good poetry always does—is make you uncomfortable. It forces you to look at the things you’d rather ignore. It demands that you confront the fractures in your life, your relationships, and your identity. And then, just when you think you’re about to fall, it offers you a bridge.
But make no mistake: this isn’t a bridge that promises resolution or perfection. It’s a bridge that lets you cross, knowing that transformation isn’t a finish line—it’s an ongoing process.
So, are you ready to cross? Because these poems aren’t waiting for you to catch up. They’re already moving forward. If you’re smart, you’ll follow.
Now tell me—are you still sitting there pretending poetry isn’t for you? Because if you are, The Whiskey Tree is going to change your mind, whether you like it or not.
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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.
