I loved the poems in the Little Mercy collection. The poems were easy to understand yet had deep and insightful themes.

A beautiful collection of poems taking notice to the simplicity of nature.

"You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in the rain."

This was a very quick read, but filled with vivid imagery of wildlife and nature. Several poems are centered around the simple wren and her nest.

This is not the typical type of poetry that I seek out, but I could still appreciate the author's words and care behind each poem. Definitely a read for any nature lovers out there!

Thanks to NetGalley & Graywolf Press for the ARC!

Robin Walter’s "Little Mercy" is a balm—a collection of poems that recognizes how difficult it is to be fearlessly gentle in this world.

So many of my poetry reviews return to Simone Weil’s assertion that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and that mindset feels like the anchor of Walter’s work here. These are poems that are so attuned to the world that they upend the disorder we bring to the natural order, almost to the point of spirituality.

It’s tempting to describe the language as “economical,” but “essential” is more apt. The poet removes everything unnecessary and asks us to feel the full, tactile weight of every word, turning them over like pebbles in hand. Walter clearly loves nature, and not in a tropey, poet way.

We might normally interpret a woodpecker’s work as a noisy—if novel—interruption, but the speaker re-tunes our ears to recognize everything else as a distraction. Likewise, Walter reorients our grammar—when we read about “rivers” as nouns, their constant motion has a grounding effect. When the same word appears as a verb, it’s often in the context of violent efforts to exercise strength. We must accept that stability is outside of us.

That might sound pretentious, but this is a book too concerned with gentleness to distance itself from the reader in any way. It suggests that people are at their most human when they are at their most animal, and it acknowledges our propensity for violence without ever indicting us. It is so difficult to be soft, and our clumsy efforts often reveal that through harm.

The speaker describes trying to hold a robin egg while knowing they’ll crack it, but they also name a world that “mercies”—a world where nature is constantly forgiving and cleansing us.

"Little Mercy" is an excellent collection that lives up to its title, and it is exactly the book I’d turn to in response to the world’s cacophony.

The keenly observed poems in Little Mercy are meditations on the magic of paying attention, of immersing oneself in the rhythms of a wren visiting her nestlings, of noticing the morning sun seeming to revolve around a daisy, or delighting in the the finer points of the letter "j." There's a self-consciousness to the poems. In multiple places, the speaker mentions considering some writing choice--say, how to describe the color of a worm--then goes on to make the choice. It's an expressed uncertainty that's vulnerable and appealing, and yet adds to the sense of inner turmoil roiling just beneath the surface of all the vivid nature imagery. In this collection, the solace that nature has to offer filters through grief and pain on its way to the page--and it becomes richer and more textured in the process.

Little Mercy is a joy to read. The poems are accessible, and there are flashes of memorable poetic language throughout. Because of some funky formatting in my digital review copy, it was hard to tell where one poem ended and the next one began, but that ended up working just fine for me. You really can read and enjoy the collection as one extended book-length poem.

My thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for providing me with a copy of Little Mercy in exchange for my review.

I loved these nature poems. I felt instantly transported to outside, watching the wind on leaves and the birds in the trees. These poems were easy to read and I think would be easy for any reader, especially ones who don’t normally read poetry.

Thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for a copy of this ARC!