Dangerous Cakes

Poetry. In these succinct and deceptively simple poems, Smith makes dancing and wine-glasses and summers gone into emblems of longing and lasting, with marvellous eldritch conviction. There is sweet (not over- sweet) nostalgia here, and wit, as well as a gleam of malevolent knowing peeping through the damask. What does it know? That the delightful parties do not go on forever. Zachary Bos