Sienna's Reviews > The Violinist in Spring

I wanted love these poems, but I don't, somehow, or can't. I do admire them, though: they're beautiful and rhythmic and thoughtful, telling and re-telling and mulling over stories in a way that brings new perspective. So I like them a great deal, like "Little Song," and this meta-poem about its predecessors.

Early Work

The one where the sky
is pale like bone
and the theme is the lives
of people observed on the bus.

*

The one with the lines
'I am leaning in the wind of sleep'
which includes an intricate description
of patterns the rain has made on concrete.

*

The one about the lovers stretched along the grass
while, blade by blade,
the sun moves over Albert Park.

*

The one with the imagined lover that sees
the shadows gather in eaves beneath his eyes.
The brittle matter of the present moment: concrete and clear like glass.
The sound of the imagined glass, like milk bottles clinked together,
coiny and silverish.

And "The Vision," which seems to see life through a microscope, emerging from a cave, speaking in tongues, passionate and terrible and torn:

A beach of wind and blackened water.
The stones are bleached hard white,
the wood to a pale, smooth blond
of intricate, immeasurable worth.

You limber up beside the ocean,
wet your legs to knee-high rolling.
While I am dazed and levelled out
by the stretch of bled and burning detail.

This will be the site of all our fights,
a place that is the edge of words,
the edge of water; anger is a flight
of hardened-out and whitened stone,

you flaring up against me, ascending
and then the bright light
haloes your eyes and we
are covered in it, eclipsed.

This slight debut collection — forty-eight poems in five sections — makes me curious, hungry, to read more by Smaill, to discover where she'll head next. No, it's not love. But it might be something more interesting.