NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
An independent small press poetry review
 K.E. SMITH: ANCESTRAL MEMORIES Feather Books PO Box 438 Shrewsbury, SY3 0WN, UK ISBN 1 84175 117 0 £4 available post free from the author at 7 Cockley Hill Lane Kirkheaton Huddersfield HD5 0HH UK email Feather Books visit the website of Feather Books        Web design by  This page last updated: 11th December 2007. |
K.E. SMITH: ANCESTRAL MEMORIES | |
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This is a wide-ranging collection that effortlessly evokes the many places it visits. In the first part of A NORFOLK SKETCH TOUR (1. CROMER: THE SETTING OUT): These ochre cliffs are creamed by fresh September light and edged by greying smoke where fishermen stoop to fettleAcross the Atlantic, he sits IN THE ATHENAEUM LIBRARY, NANTUCKET: not the one Book of the whale's prophet, scrunching through years of bloodied ice, nor the improving volumes left to those fog-bound, word hungry wives of NantucketWhether he's obliquely commenting on a series of paintings set in Norfolk, going back in imagination to Homeric Troy, or looking at the landscape of these islands, he takes you there, makes you feel part of it — even if it's somewhere, or when, that you've never seen in your life — and makes it live. Vivid images leap off the page in almost every poem as in THE SHIVERING MOUNTAIN: The turnpike that tried this easier gradient to avoid the rock-dropping Winnats Pass with its dizzy chicane of cambered ice and outlived enough torn-folded maps to become mundane A 625, is hole, is blank in the gear-thresh from Chapel that fingered down to this valley thread but now lurches back to avoid the drop.There's a useful set of notes at the back of the book which help explain some of the references and place some of the poems more firmly in context. | ||
| reviewer: John Francis Haines |