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One Wanted Thing by Cherry Smyth
(Lagan Press, £8.95) 79pp.
Available from www.lagan-press.org.uk


Cherry Smyth is an Irish-born, London-based poet and art historian whose 2005 Smith / Doorstop pamplet The Future Of Something Delicate hinted at a sensual descriptive touch and a sensibility informed by psychoanalytic ideas, a combination that at its best worked very effectively in creating physical manifestations of emotional states. One Wanted Thing feels like a step forward, the best of the pamphlet poems here given a larger context in which to resonate. ‘Lacan’s Idea Of Love’ translates the arcane French theorist’s comment that ‘love is giving something one doesn’t have’ to an affinity with landscape, where “geese tow white stitches/ against the trees, the treeline a snug eyebrow” and “the sun barely goes over the rise before it makes honey”. ‘Lone Wolf Language’ draws an equivalence between silence and hunger, words and meat, while ‘Shine On Sarah Lucas’ uses the imagery of that artist’s work to produce a verbal equivalent of one of her own portraits:

     Your tight little legs hang
     like a fag from a dry mouth…

‘Valerie and Her World of Wonders’, meanwhile, takes its cue from the 1970 film made by Czech director Jaromil Jires of Viteslav Nezval’s 1930s surrealist novel to transform an ordinary garden into a strange, erotic zone barely able to contain the female sexuality that thrives there, as “her blue flowers tilt up to speak” and even the soil gives off bodily warmth. Smyth’s best writing falls decisively into the lyric genre, and she seems happiest when bending traditional forms to her own, frequently subversive purposes. Her long ‘Destination: Sleep’ sequence, written at the end of 2001, offers a poem that takes a journey marked by place names, but moves entirely inward, noting the cold of “the first night/ in a strange bed”, “a pillow’s weight…the debris of sleep” and the nightmares of a friend who woke one hot night to find a stranger in her room, and now “on the fourteenth floor of an apartment block,/ even in August…keeps the windows shut”. The blend of insomnia, slumber and sexual and other threats finds its emblem in a drowsily contemplated photograph of Osama Bin Laden taken in Sweden, 1971, standing “next to a big pink Cadillac…dishy in a skinny-rib jumper,/ unabashed in flares, hair long and wavy/ as any Osmond, his smile ready/ to take on the world”.