Face to face

A writer of prose and drama as well as poetry, Catherine Smith teaches for the University of Sussex, the Arvon Foundation, and runs a creative writing enrichment group for youngsters; unsurprising for a poet whose own writing bustles with people of all kinds. Widely admired, her three poetry collections to date have been shortlisted for several prizes and in 2004, she was named among "the twenty most exciting poets to have published a first collection in the last ten years" as part of the PBS/Guardian's 'Next Generation Poets' promotion. It is Smith's ability to pique and sustain the reader's interest through direct address and, at times, queasy detail, which ensures the success of her work. Take 'How It All Started', the opener on this Archive recording: "Do you know this dream'", the poet queries, before feats of association lead to the potent image of "a soldier's / booted foot lying in a puddle": "how the rest of him wasn't there, just a stump / of bone". Throughout Smith's reading of these edgy, compelling poems, the curious and the disturbing are forever bubbling to the surface.

Much of this lively yet quietly insistent recording draws on Smith's third collection, Lip: a book praised by Daljit Nagra as "funny and intelligent - a unique comic-serious exploration of the conflicts between contemporary mores and physical desires".