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Love Café by Sally Crabtree
(The Poetree, £8.99) 57pp.
Available from www.thepoetree.net


Former gymnast Sally Crabtree has been performing her delightfully uncynical poems of love, wonder and beauty at festivals all over the UK and Europe for several years now, and the coffee-pot shaped Love Café gathers together a selection of her poems and short prose fables. In ‘Deadline’ a woman given a fatal diagnosis is afraid, not of death, but the clutter she’d been meaning to sort out remaining after her passing, while ‘The Charity Shop’ offers “a bowler hat/ worn by a balding gentleman/ which I shall wear”, the nice play on the double meanings of ‘worn’ and ‘wear’ illustrating the subtleties often tucked away in Crabtree’s deceptively artless lines. Another charity shop presumably yielded the ‘10p Skirt’ that appears in a poem recounting a risqué, underwear-free legs akimbo handstand on a riverbank in France, as witnessed by a passing small boy and his grandfather while out fishing:

     My little boy
     now asks me
     ‘Can we go fishing?’
     and I wonder

     if I dare
     take him round corners
     that might lead to everything
     or nothing.

   What distinguishes Crabtree’s writing is its way of finding fresh takes on her familiar subjects, bringing naively expressed truths alive with a winning conviction and a complete disregard for notions of ‘cool’ or literary respectability. Whether describing “the good bits of the past” as “tea and toast in bed” in ‘Crumbs’, or collecting small ‘Acts Of Kindness’ on buses and trains, she’s a hard poet to read if you want to remain miserable. Even so, there are shadows here too, all the more striking for falling unexpectedly: a relative’s ashes are scattered “like tiny seeds” that grow in memory, and the delight of lovemaking in a long-term relationship coheres around the image of a collapsed bed with a very quirky history and a tendency to sprout mushrooms. Most of these poems are best experienced at Crabtree’s wonderful performances, with the full force of her pink wig, plates of cakes, somersaults and guitar behind them, but the words on the page are still perfectly capable of raising a smile and dispelling any dark moods that might be lingering. Brian Patten’s description of her writing as “like the bubbles in champagne” seems perfectly fitting.