This book includes a half dozen poems for each of the four seasons, Summer through Spring. First the illustrated text, with the plain text on the following page—which made it simple to consider how Peters interpreted the text. Most of the poems are not merely illustrated but interpreted or expanded, particularly by visually juxtaposing the time period the poem was written with the modern world.

The variety of art styles was fascinating, to fit each poem. I also enjoyed the way Peters could draw a full-page image that included multiple elements of the poem, using the text boxes to guide the eye through each element. Overall, I enjoyed this book more than the first one (Poems to See By, 2020). All poem selections were wins.

Thank you Plough Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced electronic review copy of this book. This volume includes a great variety of poems visually represented in an interesting way. It is a wonderful way to introduce poetry to reluctant readers. The book follows seasons of the year and is appropriate for middle school through college students. I enjoyed seeing the visual choices the author made and which aspects of which poems he chose to visually highlight. Overall, a great volume.

5★
"The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!" Robert Burns

How often have I heard this quoted, misquoted, or at least referred to? It's such handy shorthand to say "Ah… the best laid plans…" when commiserating over an unexpected loss. This is from "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785".

[My Goodreads review includes an illustration from the poem.]

The artist has illustrated each of the eight stanzas with charming, old-fashioned drawings of the apologetic farmer and the rightly miffed Mrs Mouse, in an apron and bonnet. But he consoles himself by saying the mouse is lucky compared to him, because she knows only about the present and not the past or future.

"Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!"

The illustrations tell the story, so that even children will get the gist of it, and older kids might figure out some of the words. It's perfect for a group or class discussion. The mouse is a fully-clothed lady, spinning by her little fire when a plough blade begins to poke through her wall.

The book is divided into the four season, with six poems for each, all very different with different styles of illustration. Poets are American, English, Scottish, Welsh, Chinese, and Japanese. Espaillat is Dominican-American.

"To a Mouse" is part of "AUTUMN".

The seasons begin with "SUMMER", and I've chosen the poem "Truth" by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize. Although the poem was written around 1949, and may refer to general fear of the unknown, and 'be careful what you wish for', the artist has chosen to use powerful cartoon art to show how we regard climate change.

[My Goodreads review includes an illustration from the poem.]
"Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes" by Gwendolyn Brooks

Then "AUTUMN" (above) and "WINTER", from which I chose a couple of classics.

[My Goodreads review includes an illustration from the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".]
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."Robert Frost

Moving from snow to fog. This is a handy one for those who would like to be able to quote but have trouble memorising.

[My Goodreads review includes an illustration from the poem.]
" The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on." by Carl Sandburg

Next a couple from "SPRING"

[My Goodreads review includes an illustration from the poem "i thank You God for most this amazing"]
"i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes" by e.e. cummings

I was delighted by the bright, cheery cartoon illustrations of the mood evoked by William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." These were not the whimsical images I was expecting for Wordsworth, but they may be closer to how excited he was by what he was imagining.

[My Goodreads review includes an illustration from the poem.]
"When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils."

I love books like these, where both your eyes and mind can wander, enjoying the words, the illustrator's interpretation, and then your own interpretation. These may not all be to everyone's taste (what is?), but they are each unique.

Most authors are American or English, with one Scottish, one Welsh, one Chinese, and three Japanese who each wrote a haiku about the moon.

There is a good bibliography at the end, but I wanted more, of course. I found myself googling and looking for biographical material, dates of the poems, and the context in which they may have been written.

Knowing nothing about Gwendolyn Brooks, for example, I thought "Truth" seemed to be about Climate Change. But later, I went down a few rabbit holes and found it was written before 1949, so I was wrong – it was obviously a broader message. However, like all good poetry, its universal nature makes it just as relevant today.

This would be an excellent book club choice, and it's an obvious teaching prompt or tool for classrooms of various ages. It's a companion to the author's previous book, Poems to See by: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry.

Thanks to NetGalley and Plough Publishing for making this available to me for review. Even on a laptop screen, the print is small, and being italicised, it's even harder to read. But the pages are certainly big enough to appreciate the artwork, and the poems are easy to find online. It's available for NetGalley readers until publication.

I think the real book, to be published in March 2026, will be terrific.

⭐ Poetry | Nature | Illustrated Collection

Thank you to Plough Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

Nature Poems to See By is a great curated collection that brings classical nature poetry to life through visual storytelling. The book is organized by the four seasons. What makes this collection especially unique is that the author is an illustrator and comic book artist who adapts each poem into a short comic before presenting the original poem in its traditional text form.

Seeing the visual interpretation first adds an imaginative layer before encountering the poem on its own. The artwork varies widely in style, which keeps the experience fresh and engaging. Some poems are illustrated with soft watercolor paintings, others with colored pencil, and some through mixed-media cutouts combined with photographs. This variety complements the diverse voices and eras of the poets themselves.

Two standout moments for me were the haiku by Matsuo Bashō about the moon and a couple being reflective, it's paired well visually as the poem states...

From time to time
The clouds give rest
to the moon-beholders.

I also enjoyed The Eagle by Alfred Lord Tennyson, which felt striking in imagery and verse.

Overall, Nature Poems to See By is a lovely blend of poetry and visual art. It’s an inviting way to experience classic poems, whether you’re new to poetry or already familiar with these works.

Julian Peters has a grand way of putting deep, visional, poetry, over history, what we might see and feel of all the nature that surrounds us in this universe.
Words, thoughts, and feelings of these classical poets, become colorful, engaging, enlightening, clever, comical vision.
The colors, the styles are well beyond any of one comic book that always looks the same. Peters has made something by poets, who might be quite a guest of how he has used their poems, but they bring together ways of so many different colors…and a new generation, this is a wonderful way for people to look into the feelings and deep thoughts of writers in the past. And, lead the way of that new generation.

I love Julian Peters' "Poems to See By" books (this is the second one I've read) - the way he translates poems into artwork is lovely, and to see the words represented in a different form brings new and deeper understanding to the works. This particular book focused on poems about nature, which is a great subject for both words and art.

Julian Peters is such a talented comic artist. I have his first book, "Poems to See By," and love it. I was so happy to be notified that he has this second book out. Each illustrated poem is priceless. I would read one and decide that was my absolute favorite, and then I would read the next one and know that had to be my favorite.

The illustrations are so delightful and really do interpret the poem. 'Fog" grabbed me and "I wandered lonely as a cloud" was just perfect. This is the kind of book you can read over and over because it fills you with wonder and you can see the beauty hidden within each poem. Each reading/viewing will bring you something new. This is definitely a book to buy and to give as a gift. Everyone will love it.

I would like to thank Plough Publishing House and NetGalley for this early read. This made my day!

This is a wonderful collection of comic interpretations of classic nature poems.

Broken into the four seasons, this book features a handful of poems in each section, using a variety of illustration techniques that complement the style of each poem. After each comic, the original poem is also included in its standard verse.

I really enjoyed this collection. The art was phenomenal and brought abstract and difficult concepts to life visually. The different styles worked beautifully together, even when they were unique, it was clear they were all by the same artist. Collecting poems from such a wide group of poets in this way is a thoughtful and engaging adaptation. I think it would be great for middle-grade readers and up, as some of the concepts might be a bit heavy for younger children.

I was really impressed with this collection and now I need to check out the first installment Poems to See By to read more of these adaptations.

Art 5/5
My Enjoyment: 5/5

*** I received an ARC and am voluntarily leaving my honest review.

🍃 A Gentle Gateway Into Poetry
If you’ve ever wanted something to encourage you to read poetry, this is the book for you.
If you’re a visual person who wants to see every word come to life, this is also the book for you.

🍂 Seasons and Structure
I loved that the poems and illustrations are divided into seasons. It gives the book a natural rhythm.
Each poem has its own colour scheme and visual identity, as well as an array of illustrative techniques Julian Peters uses, making the experience feel more intentional and immersive.

🖌️ Art That Interprets
I really appreciated the illustrative interpretations Julian Peters presents. Rather than sticking to word-for-word visuals, he steps further back and deeper.
He invites us into the meaning behind the poems, into the feeling the poets were reaching for, not just the literal imagery.

Thank you, Netgalley and Plough Publishing, for the ARC.

Nature Poems to See By art by Julian Peters, 141 pages. GRAPHIC NOVEL, POETRY. Plough Publishing, 2026. $30.
Language: G (0 swears, 0 “f”); Mature Content: PG; Violence: PG
BUYING ADVISORY: MS, HS - ADVISABLE
AUDIENCE APPEAL: SOME
From Dickinson, Frost, and Shakespeare to lesser known poets, Peters brings words and stanzas to life with his illustrations. The collection of poems is grouped by season, inviting readers to see and feel the ups, downs, and arounds of life.
Peters’s creative pictures are individualized for each poem—not only in size and in positive versus negative illustrations, but even in medium and style. No two poems are the same or evoke the same images, and Peters assists readers in celebrating their similarities and differences.
People of all races are depicted throughout the book. The mature content rating is for kissing and partial nudity. The violence rating is for corpses, blood and gore, death, and mentions of guns and murder.
Reviewer: Carolina Johnson

This is a wonderful volume of poetry. The illustrations are beautifully done. This volume would be a great introduction to poetry for students or young people. Provides poetry lovers a new perspective on beloved poems with addition of the visuals. A real delight to read and look at!

Nature Poems to See By
A Comic Artist Interprets More Great Poems

by Julian Peters

The collection of poems are varied. They are ordered by the seasons, yet each is accompanied by beautiful and diverse pictorials, that add depth and interpretation to the words. Some are classical designs for classical poems, and some are very surreal, for more esoteric poems.

This is a really interesting project. The book is divided by seasons and each season has an assortment of nature poems by famous poets, each illustrated over several pages like a comic. The art style in each one is different, and really matches the style of each poem. At the end, the full poem is typed in its entirety.

The poems are diverse and powerful. They are not typical nature poems at all, and two nearly made me cry. There are haikus about the moon, Sylvia Plath’s Mushrooms and a devastating poem about a stoic grandmother who does the butchering and preparations of the dead, along with more expected poems like Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening and Daffodils.

This is a really creative way to interpret these poems and could also be a great way to introduce teens (or adults) to poetry who think they don’t connect to it. Well recommended.

I read a temporary digital copy of this book for review.

This book is a collection of some 20 poems, each illustrated. Most of the poems are familiar to readers who've taken courses in English literature.

Can I praise this book highly enough? Firstly, great choice in poems. While I wasn't familiar with all of them, I recognized a fair few and have studied some of them. In many ways, poetry is a conversation between the poet and the reader, with poets sharing an experience and readers trying to feel what it was like to be there. This book, with its wide variety of art styles and interpretations, adds a vastness to the experience of reading these poems. From photographic charcoal to whimsical 70s style, the art helps set the mood of each poem and interpret some of the trickier words. It gives readers permission to feel and interpret things fantastically instead of literally. Overall, I even though I haven't fallen in love with every poem in this book, I can now say I have a great appreciation for each one and the brilliant way the poet and the artist helped me experience it. I'll definitely be recommending this book to anyone who wants to show poetry as fresh and interesting.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC. All opinions are my own.

This is a great collection of poems. The illustrations really bring the poems to life. Recommended for students in high school . Perfect for older reluctant readers.

I found this collection of poems and art delightful. The art made the poems come alive. I loved the variety of artistic styles, and some worked really well for me. Other poems and artistic interpretations didn’t resonate with me, but that’s art, right)? I have never read a book of poems with art included, and this collection opened my eyes up to a whole new world. Thank you for the ARC!

Very interesting.
I like the concept behind this. It really pulls poetry as a medium to a different place, and I like experimenting in general. I think the choice to depict rather old poems with very modern imagery is great. It really emphasizes the timelessness of so many classic works.
That said, this didn't really got for me. While I found the concept interesting I just didn't really enjoy reading it. I do think on a technical level it's very good, but it just wasn't my vibe. Poetry tends to be hit or miss for me though so I'm not surprised something so experimental wasn't quite a hit in my book.

Holy cow. I'm, of course, an avid reader, but I'm also an English teacher, and I present frequently at local, state, and national conferences on the topic of arts integration into core content areas. I often find ways to work visual and performing arts into my ELA curricula, and this book is going to be cornerstone of my March unit plan. I literally just overhauled my entire poetry unit to include the artistic vision of Julian Peters, and I cannot wait for my students to dive in. Plough, please check your email!

After having read the previous installment, Poems to See By, I was excited to see another similar book out by Julian Peters. I think this is such a great way for someone to consume poetry or get introduced to poetry. The added visuals of the art with the poems gives a great visual representation and dept to the poetry. I also really enjoyed how Peter's art style shifted depending on the poem that was being portrayed. The only think that was slightly off to me was that I didn't necessarily feel like these were all nature poems, so my expectations were a little different than what was in the book, I feel seasonal may have been a better descriptor. Still, I would love to see more installments in this style in the future.

I found it interesting seeing how the artist interpreted the poems through the art. The style, colors, setting, etc. all contributed to how you saw the words. Some worked better than others. I felt like the shorter poems worked best as the illustrations just added a touch of context or perspective whereas the longer poems sometimes it felt like the illustrations were a distraction somehow. Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas for example. I found myself sometimes use looking at the art and then reading the poem at the end rather than trying to read the poem with/in the illustrations. Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath was interesting as it used what looked like 1950s marketing to illustrate the poem. I also like the simplicity of the famous Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. I am not very knowledgeable about poetry so don’t have any deep insight into the works or their illustrations for that matter. Interesting and enjoyable; a new way to engage art and poetry.

I was so excited when I came across this collection of illustrated poems. As a poetry lover I think the beautiful illustrations by Julian Peters really added to my reading experience and the interpretations of the poems. Every page was a delight!

My personal favorites where 'Fog' by Carl Sandburg with the little cat-cloud and 'There came a wind like a bugle' by Emily Dickinson.

I also think this kind of collection will be especially helpful for people with less experience in reading poetry who might be a little intimidated to give it a try. The illustrations lightens up the text and help spark the readers imagination. Will absolutely be recommending this to both experienced and non experienced readers.

Thank you so much for letting me read this in advance.

This is a beautiful book. Julian Peters gives each poem a different look, showing their vast talent. I like how teh poems are often brought to the present, showing how classic words still matter today.
The poems are ares present both in comic form as well as in plain text in case any of the words are hard to read.

I don’t usually grab poetry reads but this was a great opportunity for me to explore it anew and see it through a new lens, nature, check it out as this is a great focus for our troubling times.

I’ve really enjoyed Julian Peters' Poems to See By, both for myself and for my children, and was excited to get my hands on an early copy of Nature Poems to See By via Netgalley. I was first introduced to the idea of graphic novel interpretations of literature when I read Gareth Hinds' adaptation of The Odyssey as a young adult, which helped me better appreciate the epic poem. We live in a visually saturated culture, and graphic novels can be a valuable tool for capturing and sustaining attention for the written word, much as film adaptations often invite first or deeper readings of the books they're based on.

Nature Poems to See By is loosely organized by season and includes several more contemporary and non-Western poets than the original 2020 collection. I especially enjoyed Peters' interpretations of Tennyson's "The Eagle" and Hopkins' "God's Grandeur". While I didn't have the chance to read the digital version of Nature Poems with my children, I've found that the hardback edition of Peters' first collection rewards multiple rereads. Now my oldest will ask, "Can we read that one poem that goes like…" That, to me, is poetry. I look forward to returning to this volume as a companion to the first.

What an utterly stunning collection of poems (some I knew, some I didn’t) and beautifully illustrated in so many different ways. I haven’t read the first poetry selection so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this one. I really appreciated having the poem printed in full after each illustration. A joy for any season of the year

Interesting idea: short comics with the text of poems - the artwork is different for each poem (with some guest artists). Some of the poems work very well with the artwork, others less so.

This book features wonderful classic poems illustrated in fun imaginative art. This would be a great introduction to poetry for a child and a source of enjoyment for anyone else.

Book Report: Nature Poems to See By by Julian Peters

Main Idea
The book presents a curated selection of classic and modern nature poems, each reimagined through Julian Peters’s comic‑style illustrations. The combination of poetry and visual art encourages readers—especially younger or reluctant readers—to connect with poetry in a fresh, accessible way. The book explores how humans see, feel, and interpret the natural world across seasons, emotions, and cultures.

Summary
Julian Peters adapts poems from a wide range of poets, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, William Wordsworth, Joy Harjo, and many others. Each poem is transformed into a short graphic narrative, with Peters shifting his artistic style to match the tone, imagery, and emotional weight of the original text.

The anthology is organized around the cycle of the seasons, which mirrors the cycle of human life. Spring poems often feel hopeful or awakening; summer poems are vibrant; autumn poems reflect change or nostalgia; winter poems lean toward stillness or introspection. This structure helps readers see nature not just as scenery but as a metaphor for human experience.

The book also includes poems in translation, expanding the cultural range and showing how different traditions express their relationship with nature.

Visual Interpretation
A major strength of the book is Peters’s ability to use comics to illuminate poetic meaning. His illustrations do more than depict the poem—they interpret it.

Some pages use bold, dramatic ink to emphasize grief or tension.

Others use soft watercolor tones to evoke calm or wonder.

Panel layouts often mirror the rhythm of the poem, with breaks that echo line or stanza shifts.

This visual approach helps readers understand abstract or symbolic poems by giving them concrete imagery to hold onto.

Themes
Human connection to nature: The poems show nature as a source of beauty, comfort, mystery, and sometimes fear.

Change and impermanence: Seasonal cycles reflect emotional and life cycles.

Cultural diversity: Poets from different backgrounds show how nature shapes identity and worldview.

Art as interpretation: The book demonstrates how poetry and visual art can work together to create new meaning.

Why the Book Matters
The anthology is especially valuable for students because it:

Makes poetry more approachable through visuals

Encourages close reading by comparing the comic version with the original text

Supports visual learners

Shows how art can deepen understanding of literature

Introduces a wide range of poets, styles, and historical periods

Educators praise the book for sparking discussion and helping students who struggle with traditional poetry analysis.
Personal Response
The book feels both educational and emotionally rich. Peters’s illustrations invite readers to slow down and notice details they might miss in the text alone. The variety of artistic styles keeps the book engaging, and the poems chosen are powerful on their own but become even more vivid when paired with the artwork. It’s a book that can change how readers see poetry—and how they see nature.

This was a really beautiful poetry book with beautiful illustrations. About nature and life. It was a joy to read.

I loved this book. Enjoying Peter's illustrations slowed down my reading and deepened my appreciation of the poems. Selections range from classics like Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 to newer poems like "The Trees" by Philip Larkin, published in 2019. Most of the poems and illustrations target high school and adult readers although there are some that will be loved by younger readers. This is a book that might well become a beloved family favorite.

This one just completely blew my mind. Am definitely buying it when it is out. I did not read the description before requesting it. I just love nature poems. I was not expecting something so visual. It is like a graphic novel version of famous poems. It really is a must have for poetry lovers.

Wonderful illustrations to aid in bringing poetry to life. I appreciated that the poetry was provided in both the illustrative boxes and in purely text form, since I was having a hard time focusing on the words when they were paired with the art.

This is a very clever interpretation of graphic novels and poetry. Julian Peters has taken poems--contemporary, traditional, English, translations, formal, free-verse--and illustrated them in various styles. Peters's illustrations show a respect for the original poem, and while some of them might be placed in the wrong season, the interpretation of the artist is what makes this book really unique and special.

Loved the variety of art styles especially the watercolour poem of fog personified as a cat and wordworths I floated lonely as a cloud.

I can't wait to use some of these in my classroom, the illustrations were so well connected.

The selection of poems is varied from langston hughes to shakespeare to more modern poets which does lend itself to my higher review.

A gorgeous collection! I particularly liked the autumn and winter collections the most plus the artwork for God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I want that artwork framed as a series of prints on my wall, I love it that much. Highly recommend this poem collection if you want to see fascinating interpretations of these poems in different art styles.

A big thank you to Julian Peters, Plough Publishing House, and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this collection in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are mine and are voluntary.

I think the illustrations really add to the poetry. It's a great combination, and some of the poems are really impacted by this visual addition.

I thought this was a wonderful read and absolutely gorgeous to look at. The artwork was so well done and each section really matched each poem that it was paired with. I also really enjoyed the wide variety of poems and poets. This book introduced me to so many wonderful poets that I am looking forward to diving more into. One poem that I was really drawn into was "Not Waving But Drowning" by Stevie Smith.

This book was definitely not what I had expected when I had selected it, but it was a pleasant surprise. I thought I was going to be reading poetry simply about nature and the outdoors, but what I found instead was much deeper than that.

I enjoyed this reintroduction to poetry through the selected poems that took me through the seasons. The art and story telling through visuals really brought the words to life and definitely had me pondering the words a little harder. Overall it was a great visual experience and I would recommend for anyone wanting something a little deeper and thought provoking.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

Sensational.. Just what pupils /students need to 'see' poetry. A superb range of poets presented. The illustrations look modern & appealing for teenage readers.

I did not realize how much I needed this book until I read it. I love poetry, and was familiar with most of the poems included. I also love art and the combination of poetry and art. I wasn't sure what to expect. The book was better than I imagined it could be.

Calling himself a comic book artist is a little like saying we cummings wrote some little ditties. Everypoem was incorporated into its own illustration in so many different styles. The daffodils in Wordsworth's poem, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" were whimsical, with the art reminiscent of what I remember of Sesame Street in the 1970s. But the mouse in Burn's poem "To a mouse" was dressed up like a Beatrix Potter character.

If you love manga, art, comic books, poetry, or any combination of the three, take my advice and buy this book. I will also recommend purchasing an actual copy, not a digital copy.

Most lovely artwork complemented by some meaningful poems. Most thankful to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

From Dew to Fog, From Utopia to Smudge: “Nature Poems to See By” Maps the Natural World as Our Most Human Mirror
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 25th, 2026

Julian Peters opens “Nature Poems to See By” with a small act of corrective humility. In the preface, he admits that a line he once wrote – that a beautiful poem is “pretty much the most beautiful creation I can imagine” – needed revision. Poems are human splendors, yes, but nature is “in a whole other league,” so abundant and omnipresent that we cease to notice it. One function of art, he argues, is to return our attention to what familiarity has dulled, to help us see the world “afresh, as if with new eyes.” This sequel to “Poems to See By” takes that credo seriously, not only by gathering canonical poems about the natural world, but by treating each one as a practical exercise in perception: a visual translation into comics, followed by the poem in its original form, so the reader can toggle between the seen and the said, and measure the difference.

That structure is more than a pedagogical courtesy. It is the book’s quiet thesis about reading itself. We like to pretend that poetry arrives directly into the mind, unmediated. But Peters insists – implicitly, page after page – that reading is always already an act of imagining, a private cinema in which line breaks become cuts, metaphors become lighting cues, and a single image can rewrite the emotional weather of an entire stanza. By placing his comics first, then returning us to the unillustrated poem, he reverses the usual hierarchy. The illustration is not decoration; it is an argument. And the poem, reencountered afterward, becomes newly audible, as if the page itself has changed pressure.

The anthology is organized by seasons: Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring. That’s an elegant conceit that could have remained merely decorative, a way of moving the reader through a year’s worth of mood. But Peters’ selection – six poems per season – builds a genuine arc from innocence toward consequence, from attention toward ethics, from wonder toward a more chastened, hard-won kind of affirmation. The book’s pleasures are real and immediate: clean layouts with generous white space, shifts in style and media that keep the eye awake, and a curator’s ear for poems that can still startle even after long familiarity. Yet the deeper pleasure is how the seasonal structure becomes a narrative of consciousness. Summer begins with dawn and longing; Autumn introduces labor, violence, and community pressure; Winter pares the world down to moon, fog, mountain, and misread signals; Spring returns with gratitude that remembers it has been endangered.

Consider the way the book opens, with Langston Hughes’ “Daybreak in Alabama.” Hughes imagines himself becoming “a colored composer,” writing “the purtiest songs” about daybreak in Alabama, rising “like a swamp mist” and falling “like soft dew.” The poem is a sensorial inventory – pine needles, red clay after rain – but also a social vision. Hughes populates his dawn with “big brown arms,” “poppy colored faces,” and “field daisy eyes / of black and white black white black people,” then moves toward a tactile, almost sacramental image: “white hands / and black hands and brown and yellow hands and red clay earth hands” touching everybody “with kind fingers,” “natural as dew.” Nature isn’t a backdrop; it’s a moral model: if the morning can be common, so can the world.

Peters’ comics adaptation of Hughes reads as an act of faith in the communicative power of the image – a faith that feels newly resonant in an era when public language is continually weaponized, and when attention itself is treated like an extractable resource. Without naming contemporary platforms, the book’s preface already gestures toward the threat: “insidious new technologies” that undermine the human creative impulse. That line lands now with a double edge. On one side lies the everyday experience of automated language, synthetic imagery, and the subtle deadening that can come from outsourcing imagination. On the other lies the more urgent ecological fear: “our natural environment is being poisoned, dismembered, and depleted at a tremendous pace.” Peters quotes William Blake: “To the eyes of a man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” If nature and imagination are linked, he suggests, we are in danger of losing both.

The choice to include Blake’s “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time” – the anthem often called “Jerusalem” – is a canny way of threading this anxiety into the canon. The poem’s pastoral opening (“England’s mountains green”) turns quickly to indictment: “dark Satanic Mills.” Blake’s speaker calls for weapons not to destroy, but to build: “Bring me my Bow of burning gold,” “Bring me my Chariot of fire.” The true battlefield is mental: “I will not cease from Mental Fight.” In Peters’ hands, the poem becomes less a nationalist hymn than a study in conflicted landscape – the green and pleasant land shadowed by industry’s grim architecture. It is hard not to read “dark Satanic mills” as an endlessly updating image, flexible enough to encompass smokestacks, server farms, and the invisible mills of extraction and attention that hum behind our screens.

Summer’s other selections complicate brightness with memory and unease. Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop” records an “unwonted” stop of an express train on a late June afternoon. Nothing “happens,” and that is precisely the point. “No one left and no one came / On the bare platform.” What remains is the name itself, and then the surrounding vegetation – willows, willow-herb, meadowsweet – and finally the blackbird’s song expanding outward, “mistier, / farther and farther.” It’s a poem of stillness, an argument that the most negligible interruption can become a lifelong possession. In a culture trained to scroll past what doesn’t immediately declare itself, “Adlestrop” feels like a corrective: attention as an ethic, not a hobby.

Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Truth” turns that ethic darker. “And if the sun comes / How shall we greet him?” Brooks imagines sunlight as something we might dread after a “lengthy… session with shade.” Truth arrives not as a gentle illumination but as “fierce hammering / hard on the door.” Better, perhaps, to flee into “the dear thick shelter / of the familiar / propitious haze.” Brooks’ poem reads like a parable for our present information climate – the comfort of curated haze, the dread of exposure, the sweetness of “snug unawareness.” Peters’ book never becomes a polemic, but it doesn’t need to. Brooks has already written the emotional mechanics of denial.

Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” closes the Summer suite with one of the most intoxicating hymns to childhood ever written – green and gold, barns and hayfields, owls bearing the farm away. Yet even here, Time is the presiding presence, granting joy “in the mercy of his means.” The poem’s final turn is devastating: “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” That line – green and dying – could serve as a refrain for the whole anthology, a reminder that nature’s radiance is inseparable from time’s taking.

Autumn is where the book begins to press its moral thumb harder against the page. Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” is a stealth uprising. “Overnight, very whitely, discreetly,” the mushrooms take hold, “very quietly,” pushing through loam and even “the paving.” They are “earless and eyeless,” “perfectly voiceless,” and yet their “soft fists insist.” They multiply. They “shall by morning / inherit the earth.” “Our foot’s in the door.” Plath’s genius here is to make meekness tactical. The poem’s collective voice – so many of us – reads as both feminist parable and broader political fable: change as quiet pressure, not spectacle. In the current era of labor organizing, mutual aid, and grassroots movements that accrue force before they become visible, Plath’s mushrooms feel less like metaphor than like method.

Emily Dickinson’s storm poem, “There Came a Wind Like a Bugle,” follows with omen and electricity. The wind “quivered through the grass,” and a “green chill upon the heat” passes “ominous.” The “doom’s electric moccasin” arrives; trees pant as a “strange / mob.” Rivers run where houses ran. And yet Dickinson ends with a kind of fierce calm: “How much can come / and much can go, / and yet abide the world!” It’s a line that could be read today as an attempt to hold steadiness amid increasingly regular upheaval. The poem doesn’t deny catastrophe; it simply refuses to grant catastrophe the final claim on meaning.

Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse” brings the scale down to the field and the plough. Burns overturns a mouse’s nest, then apologizes for “Man’s dominion” breaking “Nature’s social union.” The poem is a masterpiece of ethical imagination: the recognition that harm can be accidental and still require confession. It also delivers that grimly famous line: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / gang aft agley.” Plans fail. Homes are destroyed. Winter comes. The mouse, Burns admits, may be better off than the human, because the mouse is touched only by the present, while the human is haunted by backward grief and forward fear. In an era of precarity – climate, economy, health – the poem’s uneasy humility feels newly legible.

Rhina P. Espaillat’s “Butchering” is one of the collection’s quiet shocks. It sketches a grandmother “toughened by the farm,” “hardened by infants’ burials,” able to swing a knife and axe “as if her woman’s arm / wielded a man’s hard will.” She tends the sick, washes the dead. But she falters when describing the cows sensing their calves are marked for slaughter. “Their wordless / eloquence / impossible to still with anything – sweet clover, or her unremitting / care.” The poem doesn’t sentimentalize; it reveals the limit of toughness, the bruise inside competence. In a culture that has recently begun to speak more openly about inherited trauma, about how survival habits persist long after their original necessity, Espaillat’s grandmother is an emblem of care shaped by loss.

Joy Harjo’s “This Land Is a Poem” turns from inherited hardness to humility before the earth. The land is “ochre and burnt sand,” a poem she could never write unless “paper were the sacrament of sky” and ink were “the broken line of / wild horses staggering the horizon.” Even then she asks: “does anything written ever matter to / the earth, / wind, / and sky?” It’s a question that hangs over every artistic response to ecological crisis: What is the moral weight of art when the world is burning? Peters doesn’t answer; he stages the question in the very act of making, refusing both despair and self-congratulation.

Mary Karr’s “The Voice of God” offers a bracing tonal shift: God speaking from “the bowels of the subway,” insisting that ninety percent of what’s wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath. No five-year plan. No long-term solution. Just small, fond, local instructions. “Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.” In the midst of American public life – where violence and spectacle often crowd out basic care – Karr’s poem is an anti-theology of common sense. It suggests that transcendence may arrive not as cosmic revelation but as the obvious thing we refuse to do. Peters’ decision to include a poem that begins underground, in a subway, also widens the anthology’s definition of “nature.” Nature is not only forest and field; it’s the animal fact of bodies that need warmth, food, rest.

Winter strips the world to essentials, and the comics medium shines here, because comics excel at the eloquence of minimal gesture. The three haiku about the moon – Basho, Shiki, Choshu – arrive as tiny instruments for calibrating attention. Clouds “give rest to the moon-beholders.” A monkey contemplates how to catch hold of the moon. The moon in water breaks and breaks again, “still it is there.” These poems are lessons in non-ownership, in the persistence of the real beneath shattered reflection. In a time when images are endlessly reproducible, endlessly manipulable, the haiku insist on something older: the moon is not content. It is presence.

Tennyson’s “The Eagle” is power distilled: he clasps the crag, ring’d with azure, watching from mountain walls, then falling “like a thunderbolt.” Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is temptation and duty in perfect balance: the woods lovely, dark, deep; the traveler drawn toward stillness; the horse ringing its harness bells as if to ask whether the stop is a mistake; the closing insistence of “miles to go before I sleep.” Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” is the season’s social tragedy: a distress signal misread as play, a life spent “much too far out.” Li Po’s “Alone Looking at the Mountain” offers the counterpoint, solitude as companionship: birds and clouds depart, and the speaker sits with the peak, neither growing tired of the other. Sandburg’s “Fog” ends the winter suite with a small, perfect animal metaphor: fog comes on “little cat feet,” sits looking over harbor and city, then moves on. It’s a poem about transience, but also about quiet authority – how the world can change shape without noise.

Spring returns not as naive brightness, but as a deliberate reopening. E. E. Cummings’ “i thank You God for most this amazing” is one of the great poems of gratitude in English, and it reads here like resurrection without doctrine. “i who have died am alive again today,” he writes, and the day becomes the sun’s birthday, the birth day of life and love and wings. The poem ends with perception itself awakening: “now the ears of my ears awake and / now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” In the context of Peters’ preface, that opening is almost a manifesto. The book wants to reopen our senses against numbness.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sandpiper” is the spring poem that refuses serenity. The bird runs in “controlled panic,” obsessed with the spaces between grains, a “student of Blake.” The world becomes mist, then minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher or lower; he cannot tell. His beak is focused; he is looking for something, something, something. Bishop captures the mind’s compulsive hunger for detail, the way attention can become both survival strategy and trap. It is hard not to hear the modern mind in that bird – scanning, searching, preoccupied – even while the ocean roars beside it, taken for granted.

Christina Rossetti’s “A Birthday” returns pleasure with ornament: heart like a singing bird, an apple-tree bent with fruit, a rainbow shell in a halcyon sea. “Because my love is come to me,” she demands a dais of silk and down, purple dyes, doves, pomegranates, peacocks with a hundred eyes. The poem is an ecstatic insistence that joy deserves craft, that beauty should be built. Philip Larkin’s “The Trees” complicates spring with grief: trees coming into leaf “like something almost being said,” greenness as grief, because their rebirth makes us think of our aging. Yet Larkin refuses to surrender: “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” Wordsworth’s daffodils offer the classic bargain of memory: the flowers return later, unbidden, to the inward eye, and the heart dances again. Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” closes the anthology with its double vision: the world charged with God’s grandeur, flaming out like shook foil, and yet all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil. Still: “nature is never spent.” There lives “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Morning springs because the Holy Ghost broods with bright wings. In the era Peters names in his preface – a time of smudge, of depletion, of threatened imagination – Hopkins offers a theology of replenishment without denial.

If “Nature Poems to See By” sometimes falls short of perfection, it does so because its strength is also its risk. Peters embraces a wide variety of visual approaches, honoring the diversity of the source material. The result is a gallery of styles, a restless showcase of modes. That variety is exhilarating, and it suits a collection spanning Hughes to Basho, Plath to Harjo. Yet it can also produce a mild sense of channel-switching. Some readers may crave a more unified aesthetic world – a single visual atmosphere that binds the book as one continuous artifact rather than a curated portfolio. Peters’ commitment is principled, and in many cases it’s precisely what keeps the book awake. But the cost of variety is occasional discontinuity.

Still, what the book accomplishes is rare: it makes classic poems feel not merely accessible but newly unstable, as if their meanings could shift under the pressure of a different medium. It belongs, in that sense, to the lineage of ambitious adaptation anthologies like “The Graphic Canon,” while remaining more intimate and more disciplined in its focus. It also sits comfortably beside poetry-comics projects such as “Embodied: An Intersectional Comics Poetry Anthology,” though Peters’ method is less collaborative and more curatorial – a single sensibility moving through many voices. And it stands in direct conversation with its predecessor, “Poems to See By,” expanding the first book’s premise into a seasonal ecology of attention.

Perhaps the deepest compliment to “Nature Poems to See By” is that it makes you want to test your own seeing. You finish a poem and find yourself looking at the nearest tree, the nearest patch of sky, the nearest weathered sidewalk crack, as if it might contain a line you haven’t learned to read yet. That is Peters’ hope: that the poems he has illustrated can help us open our eyes in time. Not to escape the world, but to return to it – to notice the dew, the red clay after rain, the fog’s cat feet, the daffodils stored behind the eyelids, the charged foil of morning. In a culture increasingly tempted by substitution – synthetic image, automated voice, mediated attention – this book insists on the old-fashioned, radical act of looking.

Rating: 89/100

I loved reading this illustrated book of poetry. It included a wide variety of poems—each matched with a unique art style. Spying the bright colors, my ten-year-old sat down and read several with me. We both enjoyed the playful adaptations, weaving together the mood of the words with the art. This book will be released March 24, 2026 and I highly recommend it to anyone eager to introduce their kids to poetry!

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in the review are completely my own.

Beautiful book. I love putting art to words. These are selected poems from Shakespeare to poets I've not heard of before. The art styles vary, the most obscure one that I had to read over again was 'Mushrooms'. If you're looking for consistency, you will not get it here but that is okay. Exploring the different styles kept me reading. This book would be great for artists studying different mediums and seeing how they would interpret art and words.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is a beautiful compilation of poetry—some poems I knew and some I was introduced to—complemented by unique and evocative art. The variety of styles is impressive, and the art provides interesting new contexts for several of the poems. I also appreciated having the clean stanza'd versions after each art piece, as sometimes it's hard to catch the rhythm and punctuation of the poems when using comic style text boxes. Altogether a really captivating experience! I do hope to pick up the first volume soon.

What a beautiful book! Nature Poems to See By shows the power of words and images - both alone and together. This book is divided into four sections, each highlighting a different season. There is a wide mix of poems conveying a different aspect and feeling of a particular season - there are some familiar names and lines as well as new-to-me poets and poems. The art styles also change from poem to poem which adds another layer of appreciating the many ways poetry and art can be interpreted and enjoyed. Naturally some of the poems and artwork were more compelling and hard-hitting to me than others, but isn't that also the beauty of poetry and visual art? I appreciate that the art often showed me a different way to interpret a line in a poem or the ideas/feelings the poet might have been trying to capture. Overall this was a great way to enjoy a variety of poems and art in style and content.

Huge thanks to Plough Publishing and NetGalley for this beautiful e-arc and for introducing me to the work of Julian Peters! I imagine Nature Poems to See By will be even better in hardcopy!

I adored “nature poems to see by” by illustrator Julian Peters. I think it’s an amazing and colorful way to introduce people to poetry. Poetry is so important, especially now, but it has the connotation of being difficult or snobby, and I say that as a lover of poetry, so it’s really great to have books that can show people the visuals of the words, to help them understand, to see what the poem says. I think it’s great, I am saving this title to request at my local library so that others will be able to experience it.

Thank you Plough Publishing for the opportunity to read an Advanced copy of Nature Poems to See By by Julian Peters. As someone who struggles to understand poetry, I loved the format of the book with comic style formatted illustrations that helped me understand more of the poems than I would have been able to understand on my own. I especially liked how the author/illustrator often depicted older poems through a modern lens which allowed the poem to be more relatable to me. The style of artistic depictions also varied throughout the book which kept it highly interesting. I look forward to more Poems to See By books being published in the future.

This is a fabulous way to look at poetry. I highly recommend even (and especially) for those who have a hard time interpreting poetry on its own. The different art styles really highlight the different tones of each poem.

“If nature and imagination are inextricably linked, we are in serious danger of losing both.”
I was excited to read this collection of poems because nature poems are my favorite kind, and this book did not disappoint! This may also be my new favorite way to view poetry. The illustrations were perfect for every poem and added so much to the storytelling. My favorite illustrations were for the poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” by William Wordsworth.
The selection of poems in general were great this collection. I appreciated being able to read the poem in plain text afterwards to really absorb it. My favorite poems were “Truth” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “Fog” by Carl Sandburg. This is a book that I know I will come back to and I am interested in checking out Peters’ other collection of poems.

In "Nature Poems to See By," Peters transmutes the musicality of language into visual resonance, marrying poetry and art in a dialogue that continually rumples the fabric of interpretation. The drawings themselves act as interpretive renderings of the verses, stimulating both mind and sense.

Many traditional poems reappear in a modern context, where humanity battles and suppresses the beauty of life’s origin in an ode to nature freed from Man’s unfeeling touch. And yet, the visuals add a deeply human component often absent in text alone. For example, we come across a blackbird singing bright and true, its belly rising beneath the eyes of resting World War soldiers, marginal and implicit in Edward Thomas’ "Adlestrop."

Peters also captures shades of green with an attention that brings nature’s complexity out into the open, inviting a reckoning with the art of recreation itself. Across the collection, the medium is constantly in play: hand-drawn illustrations, curated magazine cutouts, and photographs with flecks of colored shapes born of a playful, inventive mind.

But not all is fair and quiet. Human forms bristle as they slide into their animalistic, “earth-born” companions, unsettling the boundary between the divine and the divinely forgotten. Rhina P. Espaillat’s "Butchering" receives an especially haunting treatment, with teary paintings livening the tensions between subject and object—and the shared nature of sentiment.

As a whole, the collection is a visual feast, experimental in format and rich in expressive possibility. Most importantly, Peters’ imagery develops as parallel poems in their own right—destabilizing and new—leaving us caught fully between seeing and feeling, someplace between words and shades, and forever between the wild and the human.

I directly clicked on read now for this one because I am a poetry lover already, but when they have graphics too? Directly convinced! Poetry is the most vivid genre, where you can feel and see things in only few words and this one delivered. The fact that it's divided between seasons, and it has some of my favourite poems too (especially sonnet 18 from Shakespeare and really anything written by Tennyson). And the arts are absolutely stunning, really what an amazing discovery with this collection! I really want the physical copy now to admire the arts even more.

really enjoyed reading this book of poetry combined illustrations similar to a graphic novel. The color palette used is not overly harsh or alarmingly vivid and just an adds to the overall aesthetic. The poems chosen are from a variety of well known writer and the illustrations add to the depth and meaning of each poem. This would be a great way to introduce anyone to poetry without it feeling overwhelming or boring. Thank you net galley for my review copy.

I'm the kind of person who usually prefers straight forward poems, mostly because I waqs never taught how to analyze and dissect them properly, so anything more complicated flies right over my head. This collection has a lot of different styles of varying complexity, but having the illustrations for all of them really did help me get a lot more out of all of them than just reading them by themselves. I feel like this format of poetry should be a lot more common, because it's an excellent way to enjoy a form of storytelling that takes a little more out of the reader than prose does.

What a stellar piece of work. It was so beautiful, moving and captured the essence of each poem perfectly. I loved the variety of writers, genres, and the quality of the art was fantastic. It moved me so much. It made me have a new found appreciation for some of the poems that I had read in the past. I loved that it was based on the seasons. I loved how different each art style was. I think books like these are why writing and creativity and the arts matter so much. It was absolutely a work of art. A book I will never forget.

I am not a lover of poetry, but I keep trying to love more of it than I currently do, so I thought this book would be helpful in accomplishing this [I read the first book of illustrated poems by this author and loved it and in all fairness, would recommend it before this one]. I was mostly right.

Divided into the 4 seasons [winter and spring were my favorites in this book], each season features poems [I only knew one poem in this collection this time around] that have been illustrated by the author; some are colorful, some are black & white. Some are stark, some very busy, many are whimsical, but all become very thought-provoking when shown through the lens of illustrations.

While I didn't love all of the poems featured here, I did love the illustrations and how they brought the poetry to life and I DID find several new favorites, and so I will take that as a win!

I was invited to read/review this by the publisher [Plough Publishing/Plough Publishing House] and I thank them, Julian Peters, and NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review