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In the Dangerous Cloakroom by Kathryn Daszkiewicz
(Shoestring Press, £8.95)
Available from www.shoestringpress.co.uk


Kathryn Daszkiewicz (who, I can’t help but note, would be a very powerful figure on the Scrabble board; I’m sorry I’ll try and pull myself together) also has a connection to Lincolnshire – in that she lives and works there, or at least she did in 2006, when  In the Dangerous Cloakroom was published.  This is her first full collection, although her poems have featured in magazines and anthologies for a number of years.  The voice that sounds through the poems is a rather sad and occasionally bitter one. Or looked at another way, maybe it’s simply realistic and intelligently disillusioned.  It’s a fine line, isn’t it?  There are a lot of poems in In the Dangerous Cloakroom that address a broken relationship, its causes and consequences, and the wounded human heart exposed is, as we know, perilous territory for poetry.  So I suppose I ought to expect some of the poems to feel a little too naked for (my) comfort.  They work best for me when they place themselves at a slight remove.

     Home, I unpack.  My nightdress
     smells of the country, of your house.
     Restless, I walk outside, look at my sky –
     it’s a town sky.  Half the stars are missing.

                                                                               (‘Seeing Stars)

Often the best way of writing about it is not writing about it, if you know what I mean. 

That the poems are very easy to read is an enviable achievement. Many of them have an almost diary-like quality, but I find this can sometimes make the writing feel a bit unnecessarily flat and prose-y…

     …  You can bring me here

     this afternoon because she’s out.  I’m
     curious I suppose, want to compare
     the real thing with the picture that’s
     built up these past weeks in my head.

                                                                    (‘Because She’s Out’)

Minor quibbles aside, if you’re a fan of Carol Ann Duffy (or even the Carol Ann Duffy-ish) I would have thought In the Dangerous Cloakroom wouldn’t disappoint. Oh, and I must mention the cover – which is a reproduction of one of Paula Rego’s hauntingly sinister etchings, ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’, in which a Bo-peep type figure tangles with an enormous, overbearing black ram.  It complements perfectly the brooding psychological climate of the poems.