James Sutherland-Smith

The poems in James Sutherland-Smith's eighth collection move from the garden into the neighbourhood of "a down-at-heel Hapsburg town" and then range into the nearby forest, the personal and the past. Borders are crossed and seemingly insignificant creatures suddenly gain visionary dimensions. The title poem recalls a poet whose attention to the small-scale made his work seem minor, yet as Hardy wrote "he noticed such things," a heedfulness absent in a contemporary world where both simplistic analysis and solutions constantly fail to address threats to our very existence. The namesake of a war criminal has been chopping wood for three days hefting an orange-handled axe. Behind him three hunting dogs bark at the nonchalant passage of a cat.

Sixty-four improvisations, whose principal motifs are a stretch of a small river in Central Europe and a once feral black cat, navigate the language that we inhabit and that inhabits us. Three philosophers or the three musketeers, Boris Karloff, Li Bai and an Indian companion, among others, ghost in and out of poems ordered according to the progress of the seasons. Their moods and perspectives range from the inconsequential and paradoxical to the melancholic and erotic. Almost all the poems are in some measure love poems. Later the sky will be a light blue yearning for the transcendence to which the river whispers. I kiss your throat. The black cat chases herself up and down the stairs. Shall we get up, shower and dress or otherwise, nakedness being no constraint on the best or worst we can do?

"This is a masterpiece. The love poetry is especially beautiful. The entire sequence is in a way a love poem (and therefore must include some hate). The poem is a fine discourse on language, especially poetic language, and on simple speech aspiring to truth while aware that this is an ideal forever double-crossed by the duplicity of words in the human mouth." (Irving Weinman) "I read it through at one sitting, relishing the wit and observation. Somewhere around 42 I began to feel that this is a really wonderful sequence of poems - it has its own world, risky, audible and absorbing, shot through with paronomasia and otherworldly insight." (Piers M. Smith) "It is quite the most extraordinary work. What greatly strikes me is the ease with which [ - ] thought moves from the garden to China and elsewhere and the conflation in the final poem is truly remarkable. Breathtakingly so." - Marius Kociejowski

Some months before the year of revolutions a late friend took a train into the heartland of what was held up as a model of despotism; a stopping train, in his compartment one other passenger clad in a blue suit needing thirty minutes attention from a stiff clothes brush. Opening a mildly indecent magazine this other proceeded to masturbate for two hours of the journey before alighting at a border post somewhere between pine forest and pine forest...from "The Blue Company". This book records the author's final detachment, in every sense of the word, from his country of origin. The poems emerge from places where political upheaval has recently occurred and record the aftershock of moral and spiritual earthquakes, often in intimate contexts.

James Sutherland Smith's poems draw on his experiences of life in the Middle East and Middle Europe; what is most strange, they tell us, is to be found not in the exoticism of remote locales, but close to home. His language ventures into foreign and domestic places, into nature, politics, and the self-discoveries and self-deceptions of sexuality. A poem may begin as a purposeful quest but find its meaning in falling by the wayside. It may set out in full possession of its wits and end the journey distracted and unsure. All the poems are marked by a fascination with appropriate language and are alive to the textures of the world.