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Supreme Being, Martha Kapos, 2008, Enitharmon Press, £8.95.  ISBN 978-1-9046346-2-1

“The experience of taking in a
Kapos poem is reminiscent of
watching a speeded-up film of
a crystal growing under high
magnification”

‘Her style is highly original, a sort of intellectual Cubism’ – so the book-back tells us and, for the most part, is spot on. Kapos is a master of expansion of the fleeting glimpse and the emotional moment. Whether the topic is loss (of the old, of babyhood – quite a few ‘baby’ poems here – or of living memory) or the process of discovery (skills, possibilities, the simplest experience), Kapos conjures her poems out of the smallest aspect, such as an accumulation of dust (The School for Dust) or a gust of wind (Gust), and builds on it, usually not in the direction that many other poets would take.

From The School for Dust: “I am fully aware that you / accumulate behind the radiator / roll in rough balls and huddle // ... / So let me hear no more talk // of radiance or eternal life.”; and from Gust: “Nothing prepared me for the way you walked / on ahead and carried on with deliberate speed / until reaching your own last border you // ... // but there you were again crawling / on a distant hillside...”

The experience of taking in a Kapos poem is reminiscent of watching a speeded-up film of a crystal growing under high magnification, as she extends/appends one angular thought or image from/onto another. The poems are generally presented formally – tercets, couplets, quatrains – suggesting a smoothness at odds with, and so supporting the effects of, the zig and zag of the ideas being brought together. Here are lines extracted from The Wild Duck in the Attic, a poem in twelve tercets:

When our minds have shut their doors
the rooms hum as if the house,
eyes closed, rests sideways

on a pillow dreaming
...
like an alphabet we’d learned by heart:
...
like blood under a thumbnail
...

the skeletal elbow of the stairs bending,

your skin so transparent it’s like
two inches of tap water in the bath.
...
the attic door blows open like a shining example.
...
breath your secret breath, wild duck,
like a god in the dark.

There are regular references to song lyrics – torch songs, moody melodies – which are interesting and enjoyable, even if the reason for their presence is a little puzzling in places. How, for instance, does the poem, The Pines (“... I’m in the far corner of her lips // where she keeps her kiss / just out of reach.”), fit into this collection? It seems to present a relationship only imagined from the lyric presented (‘Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me. / Where did you sleep last night?’), rather than from something observed or experienced, which the rest of the poems seem to present.

There is much more to explore in this collection but I leave you with the first stanza (of two) of the title poem, Supreme Being, which I find both haunting and beautiful: “Let me sit beside you / while you throw your arms around me / like a frame so that animals / and flowers do not spread / across the walls and become too real”.