📖 Book Review ~ Wild Devotion : Ten Nature Poems by Kathryn Bevis

 

Candlestick Press
August 2026

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this pamphlet 

The pages of this richly lyrical pamphlet are alive with plants and wild creatures, with birdsong and weather, and with the transformations of the changing seasons. Every poem offers a moment of intense looking; the vividness of nature is celebrated for its own sake and for what it might teach us about our own lives.

Kathryn Bevis was an award-winning poet whose work was widely acclaimed for its close and loving attentiveness to the natural world. There are poems here in which nature seems to speak with compelling directness, asking to be trusted and offering consolation:

“I am held by this place. Each leaf
promises the sunlight in her veins. Look.
There, where oat and velvet grasses toss
their fringe. There, where meadow browns flicker…”

These poems will delight and move readers who will find in their singing lines an irrepressible joy – a reminder of the poet’s wild devotion to the world she loved and so beautifully put into words.

Cover illustration by Sam Cannon

Donation to Jane Scarth House 

📖 My Review..

I was saddened to learn of the passing of this talented poet and so feel even more privileged to be able to read Wild Devotion which shares ten of Kathryn’s beautiful poems about nature. There is something very special about reading a set of poems which conjure, so successfully, the natural world in such a special and poignant way. From celebrating the weather of the changing seasons, to the hazardous environment of a frog’s journey to the pond and the sanctuary of a woodland canopy, the words shimmer and shine like jewels.

I found Wild Devotion to be an emotional read with beautiful poems which I know I shall want to return to re-read again and again.

Ephemera 

“ Feel

The flood of love a body - yes

even one as frail as this - is capable

of carrying. Gather it all. Hold

it close. Learn to let it go. “

From its beautiful cover, with its iridescent dragonfly and colourful grasses and with similarly designed end papers Wild Devotion: Ten Nature Poems is a lasting legacy and beautiful tribute to a talented and much missed poet.

About Kathryn Bevis

Kathryn Bevis (1975 – 2024) was a poet and teacher whose pamphlet Flamingo (Seren) was one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ for 2022. Her debut collection The Butterfly House (Seren) was posthumously shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025. Poems by Kathryn won the Wales Poetry Award, the Crysse Morrison Award, and the Second Light Competition. ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written – in 2023.

About the Publisher 

Candlestick Press is a small, independent press publishing sumptuously produced poetry pamphlets that serve as a wonderful alternative to a greetings card, with matching envelopes and bookmarks left blank for your message. Their subjects include Mountains, Clouds, Walking, Birds, Wine and Happiness. Candlestick Press pamphlets are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, galleries and garden centres nationwide and available to order online.

Twitter/X @poetrycandle 

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