Much with Body

“I am all sensibility,” declares the speaker in Polly Atkin’s collection of poems, Much With Body. As we learn, this sensibility includes a seemingly microscopic vision and an almost supernatural capacity to feel, as Atkin moves through the world with chronic illness and with the ability to detect the faintest elevation of the ground or pressure of gravity around her. 

Atkin takes care to highlight the smallest dramas of a sick person’s day, while also drawing our attention to a richness of experience, as in the poem “Isolation Blessing,” whose speaker only travels “between the bedroom and living room, living room / and bathroom, bathroom and kitchen, kitchen / and garden,” yet manages, nonetheless, to visit herons and frogs and to find a cross-species companionship within their small radius. An entirely new ecology becomes enlivened through her gaze. 

But Atkin complicates what it means to inhabit an ill body and her poems meditate on a core aspect of being sick, which is the feeling of waiting: Waiting for things to change. Waiting to feel a bit better. There is a thesis on patience within poems like “Hunting the Stag,” in which we learn “The stag doesn’t visit because you want him to. It doesn’t work like that.” These issues are addressed more explicitly in “Unwalking”:

Waiting is not the opposite of walking.
Unwalking is not the same as waiting
I do not have to move to be moved. Are you moved?

In the same poem, Atkin writes that the “untrained observer” might look upon the speaker and see the “dead planet of me.” Later she writes: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I— / I couldn’t travel either of them.” Yet in these poems, the line itself becomes a point of travel, not just a stream of thinking. The “horizon grows wider,” we chase “the train of a comet,” and we learn that the speaker’s “breath got lost in the post.” These poems don’t sit still and neither does the speaker—or, for that matter, the reader. Instead, we are caught in the motion of Atkin’s stunning imagination, again and again.