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A collection to make you lick your Lip!

03/05/08

Permalink 10:02:22 am, 333 words, 172 views   English (UK)
Categories: Poetry Anthologies

A collection to make you lick your Lip!

It's no exaggeration to say Catherine Smith's latest poetry collection has left me licking my lips, wanting more.

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Lip by Catherine Smith, paperback, 64pp, Smith/Doorstep Books

Now I'd probably better start by saying right now that Catherine Smith is poetry editor at the new writer where I have had poems published in the past. But in case anyone thinks I'm being sycophantic, I'm not! I haven't submitted to the magazine for a while, and, to be blunt, if I hadn't enjoyed the collection, I simply wouldn't bother blogging about it at all.

The following is just a general outline to whet the appetite and far from a proper full literary appreciation.

The collection includes some prize-winning poems and another thing I enjoyed about it is the variety of styles from eg the short padding/footstep pace of ,Ascension:

She doesn't register
the slap of the pavement

underfoot
then the grip...

to National Poetry Competition 2006 commended poem The Biting Point:

Thirty years dead and still curmudgeonly,
my grandfather is driving me through
the fog-numbed streets of Crystal Palace...

Reading the poems, a few themes stood out to me, particularly family and sex/love. These might sound rather mundane, or typical poetic themes that some, unfortunately, tend to label "women's themes". But these poems were some of my favourites. They not only struck chords with me but many also contain images I found beautifully striking. From the whole unusual eroticism in The Ewe to, for example, the "cloud albumen, sun yolk" of Blue Egg:

That first morning, he boils her
an egg the colour of a spring sky,
a baby boy's first room...

Or the mother-daughter poem, Bladderwrack:

I shape your hair from dried bladderwrack -
black, unruly, from my side of the family -

hair like squid-ink tagliatelle. I crown you
with a twist of bright green rope,

press in lobster-claw eyebrows,
barnacled eyes,...

Sarah James, website at http://www.milltech-systems.co.uk and blogging at http://www.writelink.co.uk/blogs/sarah-james .

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