Review in Stride Magazine blogspot ( you can read the rest of the review here) by Angela Topping
Shaping the Water Path, Morelle Smith (£5, diehard)
Morelle Smith is a well-travelled poet, and writes very often of places she has lived or spent time in. This latest book concerns places nearer home: Scotland, Chester, Wales, as well as a few further flung places like Corfu. Her poems are very visual and tactile, for instance she describes grass as ‘coiffed with frost’, in ‘Bird Morning, Bird Night’. She looks squarely into the eye of the storm, and is drawn to wildness, in weather, place and often uses these to lift off into metaphor, as in ‘Memorials of Kosova’, where, on a day of heavy rain, she notices the marks of war on buildings, a roofless house where a family was ‘gunned down’ but concludes with this image:
We leave history behind.
Back in the city, in the present
damp pavements glow
while evening’s troops move in, silently
meet no resistance.
Shaping the Water Path, Morelle Smith (£5, diehard)
Morelle Smith is a well-travelled poet, and writes very often of places she has lived or spent time in. This latest book concerns places nearer home: Scotland, Chester, Wales, as well as a few further flung places like Corfu. Her poems are very visual and tactile, for instance she describes grass as ‘coiffed with frost’, in ‘Bird Morning, Bird Night’. She looks squarely into the eye of the storm, and is drawn to wildness, in weather, place and often uses these to lift off into metaphor, as in ‘Memorials of Kosova’, where, on a day of heavy rain, she notices the marks of war on buildings, a roofless house where a family was ‘gunned down’ but concludes with this image:
We leave history behind.
Back in the city, in the present
damp pavements glow
while evening’s troops move in, silently
meet no resistance.
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| Street in Pristina, Kosovo |
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| Cake in Pristina cafe |
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