A review by jeffhall
Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith
5.0
Every once in a while a reader is lucky enough to encounter a voice that really speaks to them, and I've been lucky in the past year or so to discover first the poetry of Rob Carney, and now the poetry of Kathryn Smith.
It's hard to pick favorites from this collection, since it's all good stuff. That said, a couple of standouts are "Salt-Washed Pictograph Just Beyond the Abandoned Bunker" and "Self-Portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea", which is worth quoting since it's a great example of what Smith does so well:
Have you ever wondered
what's beneath the skin, working? I know
so little, I wouldn't recognize my own heart if I saw it
outside my body. I wouldn't know my own bones
arranged in an ocean bed, an octopus coaxing
them to root in the sea floor until their stalks
grew thick with mouthlike blooms.
In the acknowledgements to this volume, the author mentions that her work has been described (by francine j. harris) as "lush and obsessed and frantic and deathy", and I can't really improve on that. Kathryn Smith's poems are all of that plus quite a bit more, and this is a collection I will certainly be reading again in the near future.
It's hard to pick favorites from this collection, since it's all good stuff. That said, a couple of standouts are "Salt-Washed Pictograph Just Beyond the Abandoned Bunker" and "Self-Portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea", which is worth quoting since it's a great example of what Smith does so well:
Have you ever wondered
what's beneath the skin, working? I know
so little, I wouldn't recognize my own heart if I saw it
outside my body. I wouldn't know my own bones
arranged in an ocean bed, an octopus coaxing
them to root in the sea floor until their stalks
grew thick with mouthlike blooms.
In the acknowledgements to this volume, the author mentions that her work has been described (by francine j. harris) as "lush and obsessed and frantic and deathy", and I can't really improve on that. Kathryn Smith's poems are all of that plus quite a bit more, and this is a collection I will certainly be reading again in the near future.