Sam Smith is an under-recognised talent. He’s published a large number of novels in various genres as well as getting on for 20 collections of poetry and for many years edited the poetry magazine The Journal (previously the Journal of Anglo-Scandinavian poetry) which combined a range of material and an impressive reviews section.
the complete pieces is a tour de force, comprising 60 plus poems, one per page, each title indicated by the bold type opening phrase and each poem made of 18 lines, a five line stanza, followed by a six line stanza, followed by a seven line stanza. This formalised layout gives scope for an expansive landscape which is nonetheless prescribed by the central motif of a concentration camp world which could be either set in WW2 or in Bosnia or elsewhere at a later date.
The historical location isn’t really the point as this is a sort of melded history which moves between time frames, set during the experience itself or at a later date, reflecting on changing times. It’s an astonishing ‘overview’ filled with detail and disturbing imagery yet having many moments of sheer beauty and contemplation on the nature of humanity. There is also plenty of reference to the natural world and while this is a work devoid of sentimentality it has moments of uplift amid the sheer existential bleakness.
A cirrus sky-frost repatterns the sky,
creates a double smear of westering sun –
replicating itself in a herringbone
segment of refracted rainbow. Up,
up there, a planing gull cries, and cries.
The white man in the shower, beaten blue
face down among pink suds, and crouched
in a fearful death; backside dripped upon;
has an arsehole like a purple mouth. Thin
slippery limbs straightened – for carrying –
the anus becomes a brown asterisk.
A meadow brown butterfly, on day’s warmed
stone, opens its wings, a one-page book.
When flown, the kneeling man looks over to
the guardhouse garden, watches petals close
around day’s end sun, considers
properties of colour and light, the electro-
chemical processes of thought and being. (p 13)
You need to read this collection through at least a couple of times to begin to get a picture of the relation between past and present, an individual (or individuals) contemplating a past world of horror and subjugation and commenting on the here and now, across generational divides and experiences. It may be that Sam Smith has incorporated a vast amount of historical reading and resources to construct this work as well, of course, as applying his own life experiences, of which I know little, but this is certainly a collection which pulls you in and asks difficult questions as well as having an aesthetic quality which is very much given a back seat. In short this is brilliant writing, all the better for its avoidance of flashy foregrounding and high-wire pirouetting.
In the blood-thick dark thoughts coagulate and
clot. Pressed to the bottom of night’s trough,
gasping a wet panic, one arm reaches up, numb
finger and thumb cuts into the black fug with
a snick. Bedside lamp throws light up the wall.
Phlegm, on a piece of rubbery string, coughs up
and down the epiglottis. Yesterday
he was shown photographs – left and right profile,
full face on – of men he’d avoided looking at
by men who will, today, still believe in justice.
Lavatory flush refills., boiled kettle clicks off.
Sink-back spider, grown enormous on detritus, folds
its legs through the overflow. On the kitchen radio
the religious self-blow their bugles: at this bleak hour
a trumpeting aimed at the isolated, the rootless,
the drifting, bibles in hotel rooms, bedside hospital beds
-primed to explode in fractal minds. He switches
the radio off, and coughs, invocation for an atheist.
Steve Spence 24th June 2026
