My mind was absolutely blown by this illicit, explicit, compelling collection of poetry. I was first stuck by the eerie beauty of the book’s cover photograph, a face with eyes of striking blue and lips of amazing fullness with scribbles of shadow reflected across it. It looked edgy and I badly wanted to open it and see what was inside.
The title, heavily loaded with implication, is explained in the book’s opening quotation which comes from Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare- ‘Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip’. Smith also gives us a definition of the word lip ‘Lip: Edge of Cup, vessel, cavity, wound’ showing that it is in fact a word with many meanings which are to be explored throughout this poetry collection.
I loved the way in which the first poem ‘How It All Started’ begins addressing the reader directly ‘Do you know this dream?’ This personal tone leads the reader into the book as though Catherine Smith is beckoning to them to come inside her strange, beautiful and erotic world where streets are ‘sugared with frost,’ ‘Food sits on [a] plate like unopened mail’ and the edges of photographs ‘curl like wilting cabbages’. I loved the dreamlike use of metaphor and simile throughout these poems, my favourite example being ‘strands of tobacco sticking to your tongue like bitter scraps of clever talk’.
Although I think the best thing about her writing is her fearlessness. Smith is a writer who is not afraid to experiment, to mix idea of innocence and experience as in ‘Heckmondwike’ where a man being beaten by a dominatrix remembers his childhood – ‘he realises he’s forgotten the safe world, it is a place, some northern town, he visited as a child... women in beige with bosoms big enough to offer shelter and the smell of baking’. The introduction of this innocent contemplation makes the world of the dominatrix seem even darker than it otherwise would. I also liked the way in which Smith would take a conventional subject matter and inverts it, adding depth and showing it from a different angle. The word picnic is one often associated with sunny days, childhood and sun umbrellas and although Smith touches upon this – ‘she remembers her first picnic – lemonade bubbles exploding in her mouth; her mother’s shoulders burned, thistles’ – the picnic which is central to the poem is an illicit one, a midnight feast of sex and food and wine in an empty office.
Smith’s take upon Genesis made me smile. In this poem, ‘Eve to the Serpent,’ the rolls are reversed and Eve becomes the temptress, teasing the serpent who is desperate for her to eat the apple which has become a phallic symbol - ‘You told me, didn’t you?-it will be the most delicious thing I’ve ever put in my mouth... I might just stand here with it in my hand while you writhe.’ I found this poem gently humorous and sensual.
I found The Ewe a particularly heart-rending poem, written almost like a ballad and telling the story of the fate of a pet ewe adopted by a family – ‘A black-faced Sussex yearling, She’d eyes the colour of a drinkers piss’. The end of this poem had the power to upset me terribly and I hoped so hard that it wasn’t true.
The poem Request made me laugh, not because it was funny but because it was so true of life and how one feels when jilted by a lover, the poem is written as a letter where she asks him to ‘Send me your bed, but please, don’t change the sheets... let me find shed hairs and place them on my tongue.’ The sense of desperation and longing for a lover who will not come back is beautifully communicated in this bizarre but human and deeply erotic request.
Hope Estella Whitmore
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