ISBN: 978-1-915108-32-6
Publication Date: 26 June 2025
Pamphlet, 32 Pages
 
Anima

It’s hard to spot a lynx: it lives
out of human sight, leaps between high branches,
takes other paths than your ones – stranger. 
Your true desire is hidden.
It jumps across the gorge, scales the cliff,
and seems to disappear against the rockface and the wood.
It lives in ways you find impossible.
 
You have to imagine it – your heart’s desiring
somewhere in the hills you’ve come to walk through.
What is it you want? You thought you knew, but
that was back there, in the town, among
your family, noise, other people. This is now. 
In the silence, you know something that’s part of you
is beyond you: your will to live.
 
It is hunting, crossing frozen rivers,
its broad paws – webbed – patting
down upon the snow. 
 
You don’t want its skin: no. You 
want to be like it. The life it is living.
Sometimes, you get a sense of its light, 
within you: knowing eyes, that glow.
 
*
 
Sophie Cooke’s poems combine landscapes from the Swedish winter with the Water of Leith in Edinburgh, two places where the author walked and reflected as part of an inner journey of recovery. They come from the place we enter when we let our bodies speak, and we have time to listen.
 
The repetition of the simple physical activity of walking, combined with the gently changing scenery of nature within which she walked, made an environment where it was possible to face fear and begin to heal. 
It was not a pilgrimage but a wander. This deftly formed sequence of poems takes its readers on a wander too.