Too Close for Comfort
by Pip Smith
Sydney University Press, 2013
It’s funny the effect of sequence. When I picked up Pip Smith’s collection Too Close for Comfort, winner of the 2013 Helen Bell Poetry Award, I wasn’t primed for anything. I had no expectations – neither indulgent, nor prickly. The volume has texture: bundles of thin pages alternating with thick ones, the latter offering various portions of an illustration of the work’s ‘leitmotif’ – the giant squid.
The squid, you see, is the creature who will embrace ‘our prawn pink necks’ when we are all at the bottom of a globally warmed ocean (from the collection’s title poem, p. 27). It was when I reached this poem, almost a third of the way through the collection, that I exhaled gratefully, and started to enjoy the less brassy side of the ride of Smith’s poiesis. I reflected that there might be lots of reasons for a publisher, and for the poet herself, to have chosen to open the collection with a number of strident examples. They are topical, indignant, disdainful, cleary parodic, maybe smart-arse … and can feel a little like being splattered with a scorn-sprinkler. They would certainly avoid any pre-emptive labelling of the collection as ‘girly’, ‘touching’, or ‘sensitive’. But gender-strategies aside, I couldn’t – at least in that initial moment of reading – manage to like the atmosphere very much. Hence the question of whether I could stomach coming back for more.
To Koskino 