Skankster: Skankster

Golden Satellite Debris is my 13th book. I don't feel particularly superstitious about that. I do still feel as if a book of mine coming into the world is still an unprecedented surprise. I feel a mix of hope and failure. The title points towards a sense of the wonder and glory of life on this planet, the Golden (with a hint of the sun setting no doubt), but also a sense of life as an aftermath, Debris, a sort of arbitrary and accidental outcome of equations and collisions only some of which we are aware of. I see the earth as a Satellite, a contingent object moving in space, but on a smaller scale also the human and the poem, spinning around some unknown centre, whether we call that truth, being, love or death. (Martin Corless-Smith)

William Blake is the phosphorescent angel illuminating the leaves of Corless-Smith's Golden Satellite Debris. His cadences and questions rustle through these rhymes both melancholic and playful. Corless-Smith's Orphic muse mixes up the show with walk-ons by the pagan gods. They question their obsolescence as living metaphors of the natural world in images you won't soon forget. Meanwhile, back in civilization, the fires and rising flood waters impassively erase our human past: 'All that we hurt and bear / makes nothing that will last more than an hour.' As for genius, see how Corless-Smith turns apocalyptic topics into poetic pleasures. A beautiful book.  Jennifer Moxley

Martin Corless-Smith asks the reader, 'What is a book of poems doing in this day and age?' Golden Satellite Debris sets out to offer some possible answers, whilst also perhaps inverting the question - What is this day and age doing to a book of poems? Golden Satellite Debris is what poetry can do with 'joy and excess and possibility'. By such means the scenes of youth are recalled; dances with disputatious deities undertaken in epigrammatic fragments; the 'foreign' country America explored and the familiar regions of melancholy, its pastoral, lyrical landscapes, evoked.

Here is the debris of our normal lives, 'unveiling new realities' where 'the oasis is a desert now' and there is 'pure gold from the commingling of thighs'. Essential to this is the poet's gentle dissembling with its characteristic, almost courtly timbre and measure. We begin to appreciate that there is nothing that poetry can't say here, and that a book of poems can breathe and walk around in the world and face what is, after all, not the first 'low dishonest decade.' 

'We must head back

To try and put this all together

Into one sustaining thought

A world continuing beyond

The limit of our lonely view.'

­

Kelvin Corcoran