Where did nature go? This was the question I asked while reading AUP New Poets 12, which holds the three chapbook length collections by Zephyr Zhang, Loretta Riach and Anuja Mitra. While focused intensely on place, it was how the natural world was handled that really piqued my interest in this intensely urban book, as the three young poets explore who they are in a man-made world.

The poems found in AUP New Poets 12 are heavily urbanised. These are poems that are for a new generation of readers and decidedly less so for the more traditional pastoral poetry lover. Zhang, in their poem “Urban Haunting” writes of ‘a collision / with a familiar landmark’ noting how a sense of place can be something of a confrontation even when familiar. Riach cleverly uses figurative language in “Giants of Suburbia” to speak of the connection between person and place, writing ‘my teeth are gravestones / digging the brown hill of your shoulder.’ Mitra’s title poem “Bruised History” meanwhile explores the nature of peopled spaces: ‘your new house was next to God’s, a church / that hosted seniors on Sundays.’ All three poets are firmly settled in spaces either rendered by human memory, stated metaphorically in reference to the body, or as made by man.

Nature does feature in the book, but more often as a museum exhibit or a collected token than a wilder space. Riach writes in “A dinosaur as king of the shepherds” of ‘the thigh bone of a dinosaur cast in plaster / crossing the sea in a cargo hold.’ Mitra reflects in “Notes on a city with no identity”: ‘you turn over shells like pages of an old book, thinking not of conquest but animals in their tiny tombs.’ Nature for these poets is collected. It is categorised and curated, always in the context of human interaction with the natural world. Nature exists relative to people in these works, wherein place feels like it isn’t a valid space without the human presence holding witness. As a reader, I found this thematic handling deeply unsettling for its reflection of humanity’s vast impact on the planet. However, that such feelings are evoked through subtle poetic devices shows the skill with which these writers wield words.

Imagery is also applied through the placement of textual references. The three poets in AUP New Poets 12 uphold the modern tradition of pop-culture referencing as a technique to make their poems both immediately relevant and to convey deeper truths. Zhang writes in “My immortal angst” ‘I dream about being sparkly / I have dreams about bella where the hell have you been, loca?’ touching on the Twilight phenomenon of the late 2000s and a certain kind of existential angst. Riach meanwhile in “The Badlands” speaks to modern technology, internet apocalypse and the search for digital meaning as she pens ‘we picked through the servers / looking for answers.’ In “Regarding the girl crying in the library bathroom” Mitra refers to a pop icon’s music, with: ‘misery hates sympathy. Best / to be let alone with heartbreak / graffiti and Lorde lyrics.’ She deftly free-associates the commonality of the public bathroom space with the universality of both music and human emotion.

The poets in AUP New Poets 12 are interested in more than words, whether stanza or referenced song lyric. They also utilise the white space on the page to convey different senses of both physical and symbolic space within their poetic forms and themes. Mitra’s “Mother tongue” is a poem written in double-spaced double columns speaking of the dualities of language and identity. Meanwhile, Riach’s “Rock Fragments” uses bracketing to great effect to convey a kind of punctuated containment – that of both words and ideas.

Like other books in the series, AUP New Poets 12 has a consciousness towards the contemporary state of being human in a changing world. All three poets’ handling of the natural world speaks to a present and future where nature is endangered and impacted by the Anthropocene. Through clearly drawn images and linguistic choices, the natural world is rendered as a nostalgic memento more than an active ecological space.

I feel this book marks a moment of poetic transition in a society on the edges of making choices about how we live in the world, with a growing awareness of how these choices will affect the future. It places this poetic space in the context of an ever-developing climate crisis and an increasingly urbanised population; the book acts as a voice for people straddling this liminal time.

I choose to see this liminal world as these three poets do: with a noticing of specific detail that makes the urban just as aesthetically pleasing as the wilder ecological vista. It’s a different kind of beauty – more concrete – both in terms of the materiality of place and objectified space within poetic texts but it still has a definite allure. Where did nature go? It’s still here, growing through the cracks in the concrete past through the troubled present to a future people are still imagining. AUP New Poets 12 feels like a product of this imagining.