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PIECES by Sam Smith,
63pp, £4.95,
K.T. Publications, 16 Fane Close, Stamford, Lincolnshire, PE9 1HG

Sam Smith’s most recent book of poems Pieces, is a captivating exploration of love, grief, and especially hope in a prisoner of war camp – ‘and hope is as essential as food here’. But Pieces is also about violence, and therein lies something fascinating and even beautiful.

In the first poem, ‘Love is love’, Smith crosses the firing line between love and violence. Here, we find ‘the whole body turning / in towards and touching the other hip to chest’. Within moments dogs are shot for disturbing graves beyond the fence of the camp, leaving ‘grave rags and pink bones partially uncovered’. It is this horror that is so deftly handled in Smith’s lines.

Another piece, ‘The human brain’ explores a violent bonding between males. A male sparrow in the guardhouse cares for its young, then leaves the offspring to fend for itself. In the next stanza, a prisoner, his mind gone, attacks others with a piece of plastic guttering. The guard shoots him, then expects ‘the attacked / men to be grateful’. But they are not. Like the guard, Smith ‘studies their grief.’

Other pieces explore the idea of suicide as the ultimate freedom. In ‘He wears the secret smile,’ a prisoner, ‘certain of his own death,’ takes his own life. Surviving captives argue, saying suicide ‘is no sanctification of any truth, is simply / an obsession fulfilled . . .’. There is some safety in joining one’s captors, but there is no safety in Smith’s work. The lines are musical, lulling – and Smith creates an enchanted, awful place where people are dying, where we don’t want them to stop dying, so we can keep reading.

The poems follow each other well, from wing to wing, shower to shower. It is the thrall of violence and love that propels the reader into the later, more domestic poems where the persona is clearly free of the physical presence of the guards and other constraining forces – but the images, the undercurrent of violence reappears in dogs, sparrows, and crows, as the reader is subtly carried deeper and deeper into the memory of the horror. All the while the persona attempts to understand and structure his life in lines of trees and waves arranging themselves. There is no escape from Smith’s insight.

Pieces is nicely printed, feels good in one’s hands. The typography is simple and unassuming. The cover design, created by Shelly C. Smith, is also simple and startling. Anything more, with a subject like this, would be overwhelming.