The Artist’s Pen Bodying Forth the Poet’s Imagination

Julian Peters. Nature Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets More Great Poetry. Plough Books, 2026. $29.95. 152 pp.

Julian Peters is a devotee of poetry and aspires to share its wonders with a culture that has largely turned its attention to other art forms. Like any good evangelist, Peters recognizes the necessity of communicating in a way that is attractive and understandable to a given society, without distorting or diluting the message itself. And as a gifted artist with a passion for poetry, Peters is uniquely positioned to adapt poems into a format that is engaging for our highly visual culture.

The comic or graphic novel is inviting and familiar, especially to younger readers, and has grown in popularity over the last decade, at least judging by the ballooning size of this section in my local public library. My elementary-age kids enjoy reading a variety of books, including text-only “chapter books,” but are particularly drawn to the graphic novel format. Adventure? History? Science? When presented in comics, it becomes instantly more appealing. When I opened Peters’s book to read with my children, they needed no introduction or coaxing to follow along eagerly, which might have been necessary for a collection of the same poems without artwork.

To be clear, this is not a book aimed primarily at young children, nor does it compromise or trivialize the poetry it portrays. Rather, it offers a welcoming entry point for readers of any age who might be daunted by the plain presentation of words on a page, as well as those who have been scared off by bad experiences in classrooms or exposure to the bland and obscure varieties of contemporary poetry. Peters’s wide-ranging selections are, on the whole, quite commendable. The accompanying artwork is superb.

This is Peters’s second book adapting poetry to comics (the first, Poems to See By, was also released by Plough Books in 2020). The present volume, structured in groups corresponding to the four seasons, focuses on poems about nature—or more precisely, about the “natural environment as a means of touching upon some aspect of our own human condition.”

Like the best poems, Peters’s comics work on multiple levels. The reader can quickly move through the panels, taking in the words and images for an immediate sense of what the piece is communicating. This provides an accessible on-ramp for someone encountering the poem for the first time, or even a novice to the poetic art form. At the same time, there is much to explore and appreciate for aficionados who are intimately familiar with a particular poem, such as crafty visual details adding context, allusion, or interpretation. As an example, several comics incorporate representations of the poet within the panels—a dapper Langston Hughes sitting at a piano, a uniformed Edward Thomas in the trenches, a pensive Robbie Burns in his field, a starry-eyed manga Christina Rossetti, a psychedelic Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud.

The visual delights also extend to the dazzling array of styles Peters employs, intentionally matching the range of poetic voices and modes in the anthology. The techniques span across classic and modern comics, from playful to realistic, from spare line drawings to bold and intricate scenes. There are many references to art history for the well-informed, such as the inventive repurposing of William Blake’s distinctive style, the twist on Matisse’s “Dance” in e. e. cummings’s “i thank you God for most this amazing,” or the homage to Beatrix Potter in the portrayals of the domestic affairs of Burns’s titular mouse.

More significantly, these panels surpass mere illustrations, presenting a sort of commentary or creative exploration of the source material. Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” are transported to modern oil rigs and busy highway interchanges, culminating in a futuristic vision of a renewed, “green” cityscape. Shakespeare’s indelible Sonnet 18 begins with a depiction of the beloved’s silhouette filled in by the “summer’s day” to which she is compared, but ends with the same shape filled instead by the words of the final sestet, through which the dedicatee is immortalized.

Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” uses a mixed-media collage with mid-century photographs of stereotypically gendered scenarios to elucidate the social undertones in the foreboding fungal imagery. The concluding existential ruminations in “To a Mouse” are marked with an arresting image of Burns standing at his plow, unaware of the subtle, gigantic blade that looms behind him. In these and many other instances, the comics strikingly illuminate the poem’s themes, particularly via resonant revelations in the closing panels—Peters has learned how to make his comics click shut like a box (to paraphrase Yeats) in the way great poems often do.

Most of the 24 poems are classics from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, with some from earlier eras. But there are a couple from the 21^st century as well, showing that Peters has a pulse on the living and active poetic tradition. While the top selection criterion seems to be quality, there appears to be an admirable attempt at representational balance, by including a good number of female poets (three for every five men, surely above the historical publishing average) and writers from cultures beyond the white British and American, which have predominated in English poetry.

And so, the book features some gestures toward non-English work, with translations of the classical Chinese poet Li Po (also transliterated as Li Bai) and a group of three haiku (slightly marred by the incorrect plural “haikus”). Each haiku occupies a single page and effectively encapsulates a distinct mood or scene. The division into three panels matches the way haiku are typically translated into English, though the original Japanese form is traditionally presented as a single line. Perhaps the more essential aspect is the joining of two disparate images or ideas with the use of a kireji or “cutting word,” which might also be conveyed by a two-panel layout. Still, these haiku comics do a nice job capturing the duality of perspective or shift in focus within a singular moment.

Dominican-American living legend Rhina Espaillat is represented with a vivid illumination of “Butchering,” a sonnet which offers a restrained but moving portrait of a stalwart matriarch. Joy Harjo is noteworthy as the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, though her short and spare “This Land Is a Poem” was for this reader a less satisfying choice from contemporary Native American poetry, compared to terse, nature-oriented works such as N. Scott Momaday’s “The Bear” or “Angle of Geese.”

Peters is justly troubled by humanity’s ongoing evisceration of our shared Earth, and a few of the comics contain overt nods to present-day environmental concerns. While well-meaning and often compelling, these elements have the potential to feel dated within what is otherwise a broad and timeless collection. In rare instances the art might seem too playful or goofy, like the jolly daffodils with “noses” (à la Disney’s Alice in Wonderland), which are delightful but possibly undercut the seriousness of Wordsworth’s reminiscence. On the other hand, the cute fog-cat that creeps past the Chicago skyline seems more appropriate, considering the straightforward brevity of Sandburg’s famous poem.

The collection aims to honor and elevate the original poems, even as Peters creates vibrant visual art to accompany them. The text is also provided separately following the comic, so that the reader can encounter each poem in its conventional print format. Stanza and line breaks are thoughtfully handled in the comics, often with one line per panel and one stanza per page, but always accounting for the poem’s pacing and tone. The comic lettering is in all caps, but the beginnings of lines are represented by bold capitals in place of traditional line-initial capitals, so that the poetic line is still upheld when there is not a strict correspondence between lines and panels. Peters demonstrates attention to finer points of poetic technique—for example, in “God’s Grandeur” the text is dramatically divided within one large panel to highlight Hopkins’s strong enjambment (“It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed”).

Peters adeptly tackles well-known classics such as Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” as well as less familiar but powerful pieces like Stevie Smith’s haunting “Not Waving But Drowning,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sandpiper.” The latter features a plethora of gorgeous shoreline imagery and ends with another artful closing panel, in which fascinating and surprising details in the art draw out deeper layers of the poem. Although Peters hails from Montreal, his soft, impressionistic depiction of “red clay after rain” in Langston Hughes’s “Daybreak In Alabama” was thoroughly convincing for this lifelong southerner. I could go on, but the only way to do justice to Peters’ work is to experience it. A sampling is available on Plough’s website, including a few comics from the latest collection.

Shakespeare describes the magic of poetry in lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene 1):

…as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Peters similarly plies his artist’s pen to “body forth” the poet’s imaginative words in skillful and rewarding visual adaptations which celebrate and enrich the great literature that he admires. This book (as well as the first volume) ought to be in every public library, with hopes that readers of many ages and persuasions will discover a winsome introduction to poetry or find a lost delight rekindled. Poetry has been called “a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” By creatively stewarding and advancing the bounty of poetic tradition, Nature Poems To See By has the power to help our forgetful world remember the art of poetry. Peters’s comics illustrate (both figuratively and literally) what it means to see everything around us with a poetic vision—full of attention, wonder, and gratitude.