Towards Hope by Eleanor Nesbitt
Universe Press 2026
Wendy Dossett
This new volume of poetry, by respected scholar of Sikhi and well-known Quaker, Eleanor Nesbitt, offers up an invitation to ‘lean towards hope.’
Hope, as a notion and as a practice, is experiencing something of a quiet renaissance in popular culture, in art and poetry, and in political discourse and activism. Without hope, without a vision, there is no way forward. The problem is that many iterations of hope lack traction. They are overly sentimental, too positive. They speak to us from a place where we are not and therefore do not reach us. Not so with Eleanor Nesbitt’s hope.
This volume of poetry— honest, beautiful and challenging — brings a new voice to the question of hope. It’s one that springs both from a lifetime of listening, and from that skill that’s honed in scholarship, in religious practice and in the poetic sensibility; namely, close attentiveness.
The studies of ordinary human experience represented in each poem in the collection start, for the most part, in the most mundane of places; at a shelf in a branch of a high street chain, in a suburban garden, on a work outing, in a stomach bug, in a patch of weeds. They explore quotidian experiences with an eye to a wider picture, not just of human life, but life in general— a wider picture that embraces struggle and loss as well as solidarity and consolation.
Nesbitt’s voice is not only personal, contemplative and lyrical, but gently political, shot through with a typically Quaker concern for social-, gender- and climate-justice, for the value of life in a time of genocide, for the ways violence finds ways of writing itself into culture. Nesbitt’s wide experience of the world, with one foot in post-colonial India, and another in multicultural Coventry, affords her a vantage point for a rich reflection on the challenge of what living together peacefully might mean. Often in her poems, Nesbitt reflects on what it means to dwell with nature. She contemplates the frogs and snails in her garden, and the consolation and perspective they bring her. Her poems conjure a world made both vivid and good through the power of a generous attention that can cross divides, not only of nationality and community, but even of species.
There is an unaffected clarity to Nesbitt’s style. As it happens, this same clarity also characterises her academic writing. It’s one that springs from a certain integrity, a profound alignment of inner motivation and outward expression. She deploys poetic form and rhyme very loosely, preferring an echoing, gentle, lyrical, free verse. Her use of irony, humour and light-touch self-deprecation contributes to a deeply humane orientation and tone. The short poem about a colonoscopy is genuinely comic, while The Poet and the Poem offers a rueful inversion of Ted Hughes’s The Thought-Fox. Here, rather than inspiration arriving triumphantly, the poem evades capture, slipping away just as it is about to arrive. Surely, the more common experience.
Like the poetry of Denise Levertov, Nesbitt’s work engages with all that’s earthly and commonplace in all its beauty and pain. Despite their similarities, though, Nesbitt’s tone is not so much didactic as it is contemplative. Each poem leaves the reader with an implied rather than explicit reflection or invitation, one to be considered in the silence ripened by the poem’s theme, setting and cadence.
Taken as a whole, the collection offers a quiet yet resilient vision of hope. Hope is not presented as a destination to be reached or a cure for life’s sorrows. Rather, hope reveals itself through careful attention to the world around us and honest engagement with the life within us, in all its frailty and frustration. In Nesbitt’s hands, hope becomes less an idealised aspiration than a disciplined practice; a grounded way of seeing, and, ultimately, of inhabiting the world.