Catherine Smith: Selected Poems

Catherine Smith

• Publisher: The Poetry Business
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781910367131
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Catherine Smith's first acclaimed collection The Butcher's Hands was a disturbing and exciting book. Lip moves on from its grotesqueries and grand guignol to a fierce, often frantic eroticism, seen, as in the earlier book, through the language of the human body; clothed, stripped, skinned, examined with forensic detail. As in Heckmondwike, a litany of dangerous pleasure, in this book there are no safe words.

from Otherwhere

Drought

Pavements shimmered, tarmac softened

and split; dog-shit powdered gutters.

In our garden, ochre grass needled

bare feet, compost heaps stank and in

the dust-bowl flowerbeds, begonias hung

parched, blowsy heads. Mum threw

dish-water on her Brother Cadfael roses;

grey liquid writhed through air, tiny moons

of fat clung to leaves. She had faith,

said we should pray for rain, but my head

was full of the rumour that had sparked,

crackled into life and spread like bush-fire

at lunch-break that day; if the heat continued,

pupils at the boys’ school would be allowed

to sit exams in just their swimming trunks.

That night I twisted, sweating, dreamed

of the huge hall filling up with cold water,

blue ink bleeding into paper, of boys

kicking away chairs, the pool-echo

of their laughter; their slow, naked limbs

cleaving water. I woke to steady drumming

on the roof, raindrops splattering the patio,

the dying flowers redeemed and my body,

soaking; soaking, everywhere.

Blobs

I plug it in, sit back and watch

the luminous orange wax swelling,

rupturing, a sequence of bright blobs,

like eggs bursting from their follicles -

look, a new creature, then another

and another; I love the way they

gather momentum, bend their knees,

spring, rise, rise…now they’re nuclear

mushroom clouds wavering,

glowing planets, iridescent, detached

placentas, headless Buddhas, dreaming

Space Hoppers. Then I remember, or

think I remember, the dentist‘s whisper-

quiet waiting room, and myself, seven,

and a committed thumb-sucker,

enchanted by the ghost-fish tank

standing on its own small table,

laughing out loud at the blobs’ blind,

innocent collisions, their buffoonery

as they budged, jostled, kissed,

the slow dramas they performed

for my amusement, these molten jellyfish.

They make no sound but now, as then,

I’m sure they’re roaring in there, or

singing laments, or asking each other

to dance. Over and over they burst,

build, collapse, burst, build, collapse, like

this memory, where one moment I see

my mother’s tight, closed face and hear

the rustle of her magazine pages

and the next, everything blurs; I can’t hear

what she’s whispering to me, or if she’s

whispering at all, as the blobs bump

against the surface; hesitate; fuse;

everything they were has ended here,

and for...

Table of contents

• from The Butcher’s Hands
• from LIP
• Lapse – Twelve poems
• from Otherwhere