"The tidal wife" by Kaddy Benyon (Salt, 2018)

Poems from Stand, MsLexia, Lighthouse, etc, and several prizewinning or longlisted poems. 80+ pages of poetry.

There's sometimes a feeling that words are being packed in, which isn't a bad thing of course. "the steaming splash-back litmussing her jeans" (p.4) is ok but "where shy birds hide and flies seek dun, low-bellied cows hard at their indolent munching" (p.5) and "the crimped tumid sprig cradled in a compostable mushroom tray" (p.9) feel like there's been an attempt to cram.

Pages 10-14 illustrate the variety of format. P.10 is right and left aligned, with a jagged gap in the middle (representing perhaps the gap between the 2 people, or the broken tooth). P.11 has 4 6-lined stanzas. P.12 has couplets. P.13 is a narrow rectangle. P.14-15 has 5 6-lined stanzas, each stanza with stepped lines, the indent pattern being 012012.

Indents are also used (why?) on p.19, which has 9-lined stanzas, the indent pattern being 210210210. P.22-24 has 3-lined stanzas, the indent pattern being 010. p.55 has no stanza breaks - an unindented line is followed by 4 indented ones to represent an end-stopped stanza.

I became suspicious of the forms, and that suspicion spread. "Volcanic (I)" is centred and short-lined, with "&" instead of "and", but those features don't turn prose into poetry. And phrases like

• "she pulls a prism from her pocket to consult it for what it knows, what she knows already, what Goethe knew too about the life between colours unseen" (p.35)
• She envies the intuition of the seas, how they know like a kind of homing when to draw close, when to retreat" (p.61)

can easily sound rather contrived once the glam of form is cleansed off. The most quotable lines are often the final ones -

• all I really own is this: an urge to live and witness more fully, to visit and fix the sites of my dereliction (p.24)
• and make up a new language from body parts of speech (p.26)
• no closer to knowing if it's a lunacy that drew you to this place or if you wandered here to set your madness free (p.30)
• the same unhinged feeling where a storm is a sanctuary and a church a kind of shipwreck (p.63)

"Pearl" is straightforward and likable.