Curved bricks of nature.

Membrane coated.

Russian dolls.

Or begging bowls slotted.

Wrapped in dead leaf packaging.

Embraced by crumbs of world.

By Victoria Leggett, 14 who receives Matthew Sweeney’s The Flying Spring Onion. Submitted by T H Plant of Ackworth School, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, who receives the Poetry Society’s teachers’ newsletter, a quarterly bulletin which includes features on innovative approaches to poetry in the classroom as well as news on the latest resources, events and issues. For Poetry Society events, ring 071 240 4810.

The inventiveness in this week’s poem is wholly in the metaphors, all of which bring us back to other things we know in the world (Russian dolls, “slotted” begging bowls, dead leaves) and help us to see the onion freshly.It’s good to make connections in poetry. The last line works on the reader less immediately than some of the others, but is no less effective for that. I would urge wariness in the use of big abstractions like “nature”.