I drive through the city’s limits to see the stars…
With The Keeper of Aeons, Smith takes us on journeys down into caves, out into space and back through time, to infant infatuated with Star Wars, Storm Troopers and Luke Skywalker, a giddy guardian under the glimmer of 80’s Top of the Pops TV stars, blazing early trails through living rooms, suburban excursions gaining galactic proportions. These are profound poetic and prose explorations – going out and coming in like ripples still reverberating, long after the thought lands.
Grounded in cars on route to mountains to view constellations, in bones mounted and muted behind glass cases of museums and in the imagination of a child, already collecting memories of people, places and parts of Paviland that will eventually flicker out. This is far from Smith’s usual minimal, imagist poetry which has seen the Black Bough branch out from considered cult to global community cultivator. These are expansions of finite ideas finely captured in his debut Origins: 21 Poems and now spreading out across infinity – bone and dust, faith and flight, space and the emptiness it can hold.
What a thing it is to be so alone, he writes in Survivor and in that, comes the comfort. And with a collection like this in our hands, we’re never truly alone. Read it in a spaceship made out of cardboard boxes, in the back of the attic with spy-holes to the stars and recall what it was like to take those first giant steps beyond imagination, when we started to make connections to life and the pageant of its colours.
Buckle up and start running, the adventure’s already begun, in a time long ago…
The Keeper of Aeons by Matthew M. C. Smith is published by The Broken Spine and is available at https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/product/the-keeper-of-aeons-matthew-m-c-smith/
The Broken Spine can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BrokenSpineArts
Origins: 21 Poems is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Origin-Poems-Matthew-M-Smith/dp/1980305757/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1IG13A4Q378GO&keywords=matthew+mc+smith&qid=1681378553&sprefix=matthew+mc+smith%2Caps%2C51&sr=8-4
Black Bough Poetry, Matthew’s poetic press can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/blackboughpoems and his weekly Tuesday poetic jam can be found, also on Twitter, at https://twitter.com/TopTweetTuesday and follow Matt on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MatthewMCSmith
Find out more about all that goes on at the Black Bough at https://www.blackboughpoetry.com/
Storm Shelter 