Shaping the Water Path review

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.




Street in Pristina, Kosovo    
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                









Cake in Pristina cafe
 

Comments

Anonymous said…
the picture!!! haven't read the post yet, but i have to say that: the picture!