To gauge what a work of art encompasses is first of all a passive act. It is the paradoxical task of the critic to put herself in that position on purpose: to transform oneself into a canvas for the canvas, a page for the page. And in this way the effects of art become the most apparent after enough time has passed to read the record, to look at the novel surfaces it raises, temporarily or forever. Sometimes this is seen in how the surfaces are shattered. 

In the twenty-first century it becomes even more important to reflect on the aftereffects of art; life in the wake of the Internet is too easily susceptible to being turned off by the sprawl of information we should otherwise accept as closer to our reality. But if we’re supposed to have become more interconnected, then it has come with the cost of being disconnected individually, fractured until the essence of one identity becomes lost in the alluring but neverending digital situations we have found ourselves in. What should have easily accelerated global collectivization has been even more quickly reappropriated and purposefully stunted through oversight and negligence. In response, there have been many intelligent explorations into what it means to write within this space; Dom Hale has made this more apparent to me than many other poets have, and his First Nettles (The Last Books, 2025) has, in my opinion, assumed its place as, what I’d venture to call, one of Post-Internet Poetry’s most refractive contemporary records: not because it adheres to the post-ironic guidelines of his previous books, but precisely because it breaks away from them. 

The three epigraphs reveal early the unique positionality of this book: Jean Daive, Dean Blunt, and Dorothy Wordsworth triangulate the world out of order; a private cast of characters is momentarily plucked out of history and are suspended over the formidable expanse of the following pages. The act is almost self-aware. The poems themselves nod to each other as they pass one another by, each one the hinge to the other, each one aware of itself as an avenue or offshoot or branch leading from one subject to the next. We soon find ourselves in a new territory of Hale’s poetry, “when the permanews is engineered crisis,” a wasteland of sorts, full of industrial havocking and populated by an underclass who are becoming increasingly taken advantage of. While technology isn’t absent in this book, it certainty does not occupy the lighterhearted frequencies of memes and ironic collage that Hale, among others, have previously fleshed out in the contemporary British poetry scene. These poems consider the same problems posed by previous work, but they do so in a decidedly more serious, even somber register, reflecting a kind of maturity of vision. 

These poems do not read linearly. Instead, they help each other to explode time: enjambment acts as a carefully placed detonator; caesuras beckon and surprise. The first poem of the collection, “Your Auspice,” can be thought of as the “proem” to each of the book’s three sections. In lines that abstract the earth and so remove it from time, the last complete thought serves as the guiding clue for the reader: “How mountainous the petrol-crashed / graph of the city, / the music you follow to its vanishing point” (13). Turning away from the hyper-internet objectives of SPAM (“To bridge the gap between the internet divine and the pathetic IRL. . .”) without losing touch of the digital consciousness he writes in, that we have very little choice but to read in, Dom Hale has accomplished the art of encyclopedic fracture: the familiar outlines of people and places wobble until something new falls out of them. As Hale writes in “Purgatory for Angels:” “. . . one day the shaving mirror’s got to be kicked in.” It becomes necessary to break one’s own reflection in order to uncover the actuality that lies behind what’s been superimposed on it by the tyranny of mass culture. It’s through this shakiness that the reader sloughs off the surfaces of the poem and grows with—or into—the deeper core of the truths Hale is after. 

In a 2019 interview with the longtime anti-establishment magazine Shuddhashar, Hale talks about “agitating” existing forms of poetry: “True poets are revolutionaries; they have to be. This doesn’t necessarily mean a wholesale abandonment of forms that might be considered ‘traditional.’ The best poets invent new forms, sure, but they can also energise and agitate inside existing shapes.”¹ Thus the poet-as-agitator is realized, readily available to be deployed at the strategic whims of the artist. 

I should state that what I’m calling the fractured state of this book does not intend to describe an unkempt kind of randomness. Individually these poems are commentary on a variety of real world issues. Dom Hale swings sledgehammers at plutocracies and a whole host of other manifestations of greed. Poetry shatters its enemies, but not without hurting the poet in the process. For every swing there is an immediate backswing felt by the burden-bearer. In “Castor and Pollux,” we get a three-part narration of the poet observing the symptoms of economic corruption. Sympathy with nature (“Sparrow distress call / from the pavement fucks me up instantly / pausing on another Gigafactory, Mace Group / summons west of gorgon zone. . .) finds the poet increasingly anxious over the future until poetry gives solace in the last section: 

[. . .] 
The poet will never die 
and they’ll move gracefully forever 
in the errant places that they made, fabric of ultramarine 
cantilevers greening in the lift 
stray arches of our swerve purpose 
A threshold to hang on to 
down the blowing years out in front. Hydrangeas in streetlight. 
My song is on the planets. It will not be for nothing 

However noble the poet is in the end, we are reminded that the effort is agonizing, double-edged. The poet becomes, for the moment, a site of concentrated pain and declares: “I have a burnt ladder in my eyes / so a breach in my head. / a poet who language happened to. . .” Many of these poems start to sound like reminders to the poet themself, as though written in an attempt to reinvigorate the role of the poet in spite of the newest turmoil. News is put in pursuit of poetry. In this landscape-mindscape, where the poem is a vagrant “evicted by developers,” the natural response is to wander through the world as an outlaw, recuperating the status of one’s rejection into a kind of guerilla badge of honor. 

Nature remains as evidence for what we have and have not done to slow or stop the irrational insensitive ignorant barrage of violence that is the fuel for our desires. The landscape is the record: it is flecked, infected. Like man, the animal kingdom has been estranged and made fungible in a perverse economy. Yes, Hale’s pastorals are frayed with admonitions against the hazards of the twenty-first century. But they also serve as memento moris for the poet in the act of writing: 

what will you tell 
to the mortals 
who come after? 

First Nettles reaffirms the poet-legislator idealism of the Romantics in an attitude more in tune to the modern disenfranchised’s fuck-you sensibilities. Hale’s depiction of poetry is akin to a noble anarchist dissenting from the powers that would annihilate them. “But I’m one of the poets aren’t I / I’ll do what I want,” says the poet in “My Shadow:” “. . . nothing a relic / or employment record would strongarm me into. . .” This is felt even more strongly in “State Funeral” where Hale writes with exceptionally posthumously-pointed moxie: 

the queen will finally be dead soon 
then the people who killed themselves will walk out of the sea 
and a country will burn away . . . 

Dom Hale stands alongside Late Modernist British poets such as Tom Raworth, Sean Bonney, Keston Sutherland, and Jeremy Prynne—poets who leverage the political without detracting from the beauty of language. This book—the voice captured within these pages, although hardly contained, is one that foments in the aftermath of an apocalyptic spectrum of existential threats. If the poet behind these poems is reminding themself about their responsibility, to be the kind of “true revolutionary” as was mentioned above, then the reader is asked to pay attention to their march, if not to join along: “a poem not for ‘the universe’, but right here / among houses & scorned trees / in the arms of other people / towards what refuses demolition.”