Guest review: Greg Westenberg on The Geometry of Flight by Angela Smith
, ‘Chose wisely’. More wisely, more selflessly, than perhaps she realised. She has given multiple doorways to her work with the single phrase: porticos that set the reader’s path through the work, paths that perhaps she hadn’t intended for travel. Three are significant, from where I stand.The reading which will probably occur first and which might be called the main entrance through the façade is that of a suggested analogy between patterns of birds against the sky and verbal patterning within the poetry; an element of restraint, too, in the rather abstracted word ‘geometry’. Going in through here you expect contemporary echoes of late nineteenth century japonisme
Nothing egregious here, but one wonders why it wasn’t written, for example: ‘Night. Old affairs, stale/ Rehearsing past potential./ Sleep’s hypodermic’. The shorter remix shows what wasted space there is in the original.
The second portico is that of isolation. Like the birds against the sky, maintaining instinct-driven formation, Angela Smith’s authorial persona is always very much alone. In some poems it seems she has attempted dialogue, achieved instead a limping dialectic, as if mentally chasing her own tail. As in ‘Kiss’:
he looks startled
Smith has certainly caught her moment in one sense. The reader has such a scene brought instantly to mind. Surely, however, this is more to do with the cognitive encoding of the memory than the words of the poetry. You get the sense while reading it that, preserving only the to-fro dynamic, these lines could have been rearranged in any logical order without producing a change in the reader’s response. In other words, it’s a personal memory, for Smith perhaps, for the reader, but because it is simply a memory recalled, not further understood, the dialectic is a failure. It’s the poetic equivalent of a tourist’s Eiffel Tower snap.
Again like the birds, in formation against the sky, running through an instinctual programme again and again, many of Smith’s poems give the sense of a mnemonic loop. Almost like nails fixing the past in place, safe. Is this a good or bad thing? Neither, really. It’s an aesthetic technique, sometimes used effectively, sometimes not. ‘Sundays’, whose rhythm I have said represents a formal beauty that is in Smith’s poetry, in its content typifies this aspect of a deliberately modelled past.
In Memory Of Poems - News
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