Alison Lock’s Thrift, out via Palewell Press, is a meticulously layered offering, a contemporary poetry collection rooted in ecological reverence, mythic resurgence, and the wounded resilience of the feminine. This isn’t merely nature poetry; it’s a spirited negotiation between the outer wilds and the internal terrains of loss, endurance, and transformation. Across its pages, Lock constructs a vast, lyrical archive, where history seeps into bogs, where urban foxes haunt domestic landscapes, and where the voice of the earth itself breaks through the leaf litter. Her diction is lush without being indulgent, her control razor-sharp even in the most incantatory moments.
From the outset, Lock signals her thematic orbit. Dawn, the second poem, embodies her signature syntax: staggered, musical, recursive. Lock is charting the transition from night to morning through domestic soundscapes: “click-click jaws of the yawning dog,” “floorboard’s off-beat creak.” The poem doesn’t just describe time’s passage, it performs it. This rhythmic embodiment is key to Lock’s writing; she doesn’t merely observe the world, she animates it from within, giving syntax the texture of the earth it describes. The domestic meets the cosmic in each line, and its therefore tethered by a sense that time, like the natural world, is both cyclic and slipping away.
In The Monarch of Mabon, Lock alights on the ritualistic. The titular butterfly arrives not just as species, but as seasonal symbol, sacred and storied: “The Monarch has arrived / after her long flight.” The poem conjures a stillness, a held breath between equinox and solstice, where human reverence for ecological patterns once mattered more than productivity. Elsewhere, in Seeking Asylum, the register shifts. Here, nature turns sinister, a forest stalked by “sheep clothed wolves,” where the promised land reveals itself as broken covenant. It’s one of the collection’s more politically charged pieces, and it doesn’t blink. “You listen to hear the words YOU ARE LOVED, but no,” Lock writes. The capitalisation jars intentionally, a scream into a world that gaslights its most vulnerable.
Lock’s feminist ecopoetics come to the fore in Wolf Woman and Elder. These poems don’t just anthropomorphise, they rewild the human. Wolf Woman is visceral, its speaker possessed by lunar pull and predator grief: “Even in the civilised world, / there is wilderness held at the end of a leash.” Meanwhile, Elder dissects post-reproductive identity with feral precision, no sentimentality, just blood, sinew, and bone reckoning. “My fertility is / shed, my cat-beast still protects my brood.” Lock’s poems howl and whisper in equal measure, staking out ground where the personal becomes ecological; the ecological, political; and the political, mythic.
What binds Thrift together is Lock’s ability to make the numinous legible. The final section of the book, including the title poem Thrift, distills everything she’s been orchestrating. A child stands alone at a granite headland, surrounded by resilient flora: “They look so fragile / – but they are the tough ones, resisting / the Atlantic winds.” That child, like Lock’s speaker, stands at the edge of something: grief, time, climate collapse. But there is no despair. Instead, there is resistance rooted in tenderness, a will to name what is vanishing and to love it fiercely in the act of witnessing.
In the crowded field of contemporary poetry, Thrift sets itself apart not through volume but through vision. Lock is part eco-shaman, part archivist, and entirely herself. For those tracking the confluence of environmental urgency, feminist mythmaking, and poetic precision, this collection demands attention. It’s a survival manual for the soul, whispered in moss and bone.
About the Author
Alison Lock’s writing connects an inner world with a love of nature through poetry, creative non-fiction, and short stories. She is the author of several collections of both poetry and short fiction, and her poetic sequence of personal transformation was broadcast on the BBC Radio3 programme Between the Ears:Lure. Her forthcoming collection Thrift will be published in 2024 by Palewell Press. www.alisonlock.com
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