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The Day Is White – Mary Charman-Smith
Indigo Dreams Publishing, 52pp, £6.75, ISBN 978-1-907401-15-2
Chqs ‘Mary Charman-Smith’ sent to IDP

                       Then, I arrived in cottons
                       and a straw hat,
                       unfolded my easel
                       and sat in the garden, painting
                       red dawns and damson dusks.
                       Summer and the White Rose

It is always a pleasure for me to absorb and appraise the creative writings of a poet who essentially paints with words, and Mary Charman -Smith, the author of this sensitively crafted collection is an artist in the fullest sense of the word. Having gained her M.A. in Creative Writing at University College, Chichester, she currently teaches English in her native Sussex. And it is to the beautiful countryside of The Downs and its wave-washed fringes of coastline that the reader is conveyed throughout this sterling collection of poems.

Mary's love of trees and flowers is substantially addressed by those many instances of colour reference that so typify her work :

                     I await the bronzes of your evening wear
                     that all too soon, will dull to winter's grey.
                     Yet, still within those silver coloured twigs
                     a dainty white dressed lady surely lives.
                     To A Tree

In her reflective poem, ‘THE DAISY FIELD’, Mary compares a field of daisies to the brightest constellations of the night sky. There is somewhat of a childlike wonderment as she dreamily concentrates her attentions on one of these flowers in particular:

                      I inspect a daisy,
                      a gold-centred sun with ice-warm rays,
                      each petal representing a life phase.
                      But altogether round, like a tiny ballet skirt.
                      The Daisy Field

Coastline imagery abounds in a number of Mary’s poems as she observes the changing moods of the sea; and most especially in her poem of the same name as she relives, in verse, her openness to the full rigours of a gale-force wind across the ‘shore line:

                    I glance to sea, but there is no boat in trouble
                    and no living form, not even
                    a gull thrown across sky and iron-bent
                    against the magnitude of the gale.
                    The Sea

Childhood recollections are also affectionately revived, and no more so than in ‘THE GULL’, a poem that savours the naivety of a young girl's awakening awareness on the occasion of the birth of a baby sister. Personification is employed in great measure in ‘THE MOON THE WAVES AND THE BREEZE’ - A rather unorthodox approach, certainly, but very endearing, none-the-less:

                  And then the sea breeze saw
                  he started to whisper and sing,
                  and play the strings of marram grass
                  that lives on the creamy dunes.
                  The Moon The Waves And The Breeze

There is much assonance and pleasing alliteration in Mary’s work and a subtle interspersal of internal rhymes and the occasional half-rhyme. I very much admired her two villanelle inclusions, despite the absence of usual standard rhyming. And two of her poems, featured side by side (‘SNOW’ and ‘EVENING BLUES’) are presented in near-sonnet form - perhaps intentionally, but they read quite well, in spite of this apparent anomaly. Mary Charman-Smith is a regular contributor to REACH POETRY and THE DAWNTREADER and has been highly rated in INDIGO DREAMS POETRY COMPETITION 2009", This is her fifth collection to achieve publication, and we wish her well with all future literary ventures.