"Bycatch" by Caroline Smith (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from Poetry Birmingham, London Magazine online, The Poetry Review, Magma, etc. A poem was long-listed in the National Poetry Competition. Another was short-listed in The Plough competition.

There are moving poems about ailing parents - how they support each other and how they deal with failing memory. I'd have liked to have written many of them - more than in most other books I've read. I've learnt from this book more about how to convert a metaphor or observation into a finished piece. My one reservation is that there are far too many line-breaks. It's as much a NiF (Novella-in-Flash) as a poetry collection.

One of the standard templates in poetry (light poetry anyway) is a description/anecdote followed by a moral or interpretation - e.g. A sunset is described, then we're told that even beautiful things must end etc. Some of the pieces, well-executed, follow this pattern.

Analogy and development

How can an analogy can be developed into a poem. In this collection several methods are used.

"Metaphor" tackles the topic head on. The father describes a bright triangle seen in a tree as a kite. The narrator sees it too. Does the father realise that it's just a trick of the light? It disappears. At the end "I am hanging on to him,/ to that tiny figure of speech/ that might link him back to us/ the string stretched as far as it will go." - the presumed kite used in an analogy.

"Printer" is perhaps the clearest example of analogy, juxtaposing a 5-line description of a printer which randomly lurches into action with a 5-line description of her father repeatedly trying to get out of bed.

Most commonly, the compared events are separated by decades. The balance of past and present varies, as does the way the present triggers memories.

• "Seeds" starts in the present, recounts a memory (the link being seeds), then continues in the present. The memory is about 30% of the text.
• "Links" starts in the present then recounts a memory (the link being a rustling noise). The memory is about 30% of the text.
• In "Breath" a woman leaves her sleeping father, going back to check one more time before leaving properly. She recalls she did the same with her son.
• In "Walking Stick" the narrator, while polishing her father's old walking stick, reminds him why he's kept it. The ending is - "I leave time for the story to sink in,/ the way I'd left the wax to soak into the wood ... working to bring back the memory in the grain."
• "Changing the bed" is braided - present and past alternate.

Outliers

Here are few of the poems which have a different structure -

• "Chism" captures a moment. It uses 2 metaphors, one which takes a few lines to explain. No narrative.
• "White out" is rather differently structured, basing several Altzheimer analogies on snow - "The glare bewilders./ All directions look the same", her mother thinking that their lives will go back to normal once spring returns.
• "Snail" is rather different from the other pieces in that one of the subjects involved in the comparison isn't explicitly mentioned. There's a snail on the front door - "So easily knocked, like their old dog. Deaf, blind, lying in everyone's path." At the end "which of us has the time to look after an old incontinent creature?". There's a suspicion at an old person is being alluded to.

Observation and endings

Both observation and endings (punch-lines) are well done -

• There are many revealing observations - of parents, but also of times gone by. I was particularly struck by "Twin Tub" - the fug, the tongs, the hauling, the juddering movement, the "clothes plastered round the inside" - all details that I recall from my childhood.
• Several of the poems have a two-part structure. There's a jump (in time or point-of-view) at the end that puts the rest into perspective. For example, in "Twin Tub" the first 60% of the poem recalls childhood experiences of the family's washing machine. At the end, in the present, we learn that the machine's still in use because the father refuses to wear pads. Punchlines like those of "Blazer" suit Flash well.

P-factor

Many of the pieces are close to being Flash/CNF. This isn't a value judgement. I'm not claiming that these pieces are "just prose" but that their poetry isn't lost when it's translated into prose. To bring some objectivity into this feeling, here's a procedure: start with a poem. Then

• Adjust line/stanza breaks
• Replace poetic words (e.g. "lambent") by more common ones
• Reduce disruptions by adding phrases like "Meanwhile," "A few years later", "It was as if", etc

Read the result. Does it feel like mainstream Flash/CNF? If so, then the poem has a P-factor of 100. More modifications may be needed. If so, count the number of words that need changing before the resulting text is acceptable prose. Work out what percentage of words didn't need changing (i.e., the P-factor). You might find that the text is prose-poetry that prose readers won't accept. The piece might have lots of repetition (a villanelle perhaps) or rhyme which would need to be removed before readers considered the text to be prose. Such pieces would have a low P-factor.

I think "Noah" (for example) comes out with a P-factor greater than 95% (I added a few words at the end to ease the introduction of the punch-line). "Twin Tub" comes out high too. The medium isn't part of the message. Any classification of these pieces as poems wouldn't derive from an analysis of the text content but from external market forces. I think that the line-breaks (and many of the stanza-breaks) are superfluous - a flaw but one that's easily ignored. Look at the prose versions. Would an editor ever think they could be improved by adding line-breaks? I doubt it - prose hardly ever is.

Misc

• "Shoes" recounts a little episode of Altzheimic confusion, ending with "He hangs onto this idea of shoe/ as if it were a tugboat/ guiding him through fog".
• "Woolwich Ferry" is Flash. The narrator recalls when, a child on a long car trip, her father told her the same story about how his parents met.
• "Bibs" is an anecdote, pithily framed.
• In "Southend-on-Sea", cold towels are "coated and heavy as wet breaded fish". After spending the first 7/8th of the poem in the past the narrator is "Anxious then, as I am now,/ hurrying across a causeway/ to get back to you,/ while there's still time".
• I like "Handkerchiefs". Her mother insists on washing them though the carers prefers boxes of tissues - "His handkerchiefs were the first thing/ my mother taught me to iron; and now/ the last of his things she can manage.// She stands at the ironing board ... refusing to leave her ship."
• I like "Last Stand" - another of the high P-factor pieces.
• "Shower" doesn't do enough.