Pippa Little is another bright star in this constellation of Northern poets. Time Begins to Hurt tunes insightfully into personal and planetary grief. In ‘End of Lockdown’ she speaks to the Anthropocene in no uncertain terms: ‘something has broken/been broken’. Here, ‘carefree multitudes throng the beaches / in these last days’. Relishing ‘rather than suspecting’ the unseasonal heat, it becomes clear that whilst sonic actively contribute to climate change, others do so through passivity. ‘Oiling their glistening legs / like flies’ these uninspired and selfish multitudes feel a far cry from those we find in fellow Scots poet Kathleen Jainie’s ‘The Stags’. Rootless and disenfranchised, these throngs are torn from the relationship their journeyed ancestors once shared with nature: ‘somewhere I might have been born, before the lightning’ (‘Europascope’).

The deep concerns of motherhood during this ecological crisis charge the speaker in ‘Strange Times’ who asserts their wish to never ‘die away’. The poem ‘wrecks’ the reader at the historic tidal island of Lindisfarne, where, babe in arms, we lay ‘skin to skin’ surrounded by animal cries, ‘What else survives in the deep of cells?’ Little asks. Philosophers have some answers towards that. As do scientists, whose recent studies discovered microplastics in placentae and newborn babies.

Whilst our ‘earth inmost’ smokes, we and our rising oceans slowly fill with plastic. Five trillion microplastic pieces are present in the tiniest plankton and the oldest whales. We do not know the consequences. Like the unexplained dead and dying marine creatures still appearing in ominous, growing piles across Teesside beaches, the climate emergency seems sure to wash up more disasters. ‘Something Is Very Wrong With Us’ is. a meditation on this and further probes the uncertainties of motherhood. We discover the ‘seventeen days and nights’ an orca called Tahlequah fought to keep her stillborn calf afloat across thousands of miles: ‘retrieving and lifting its sinking body’. The reportage on her grief which was ‘photographed/filmed/followed’ was, by some, considered excessive anthropomorphism. For others it spoke to, as the title poem tells us, the desire to find ‘all of us safe’. There is comfort and hope in the knowledge that Tahlequah recently gave birth to a spirited calf, spotted swimming alongside her. The ‘unseen men’ in Little’s ‘Burned World’ cannot ‘catch and torch’ everything, after all.