Lou Smith is a Melbourne-based poet of Welsh, Jamaican and English heritage who grew up in Newcastle, NSW. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies both in Australia and overseas including Wasafiri, Mascara Literary Review, A Slow Combusting Hymn, Overland, The Caribbean Writer, Nine Muses Poetry, sx Salon, Soft Surface and Caribbean Quarterly. Her book riversalt was published by Flying Islands in 2015.
Lou has worked as an editor and proofreader and was the co-founder of independent publisher Breakdown Press, publishers of political poster series and books such as How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia and YOU: some letters from the first five years.
She is currently working on a number of writing projects including two new books of poetry, one of which is set in her hometown of Newcastle during the Great Depression.
Lou has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne where she sometimes teaches.
www.lousmith.net
Here are three poems are from my collection riversalt.
An Evening Swim at Kilaben Bay
Between the wooden slats
of the boardwalk
distant lights of houses
blur in a diffraction of amber
like Venus through drizzle
or in the curve of waves
fanning from shore
Sugar
My grandma
sprinkled sugar
on banana fritters
caramelising it in butter
specks of sweetness
dissolving through batter
into the melting warm fruit
this island was built on sugar
Mum will only eat strawberries
when coated
in enough castor sugar
to form a hot pink pool
in the bottom of the bowl
swirls into thickened cream
like blood entering water
this island was built on sugar
in the day’s heat
men with machetes slice
through hedges, the cutlass
a legacy from when those
who had been enslaved
cut sugarcane
hands bleeding
like sugary sap
this island was built on sugar
Quarry
The dampness flows from the hill
the dampness
moulds us
taproot still
the dampness flows
from the hill
and we scoop up water in jars
catch tadpoles with
glutinous eyes
in the quarry
where the men used to mine
with horse and dray
in the quarry
in the heat of summer days
skin off shoulder blades
peels like dried glue sheets
and words hang from trees like rotting vines
not sapped, not blood that drips
and pains amber red
but green and fungal
smelling of carcass flesh
lantana delicate pale pink and lemon,
the scent of not here,
lantana camara, everywhere
in the quarry
skin pitted on hard small rocks
gravel used for roads
like this cul-de-sac
where time travels in circles
the crow caws
and the bush beckons us
through spotted gums and shade of leaves,
to leave the yellow ochre
ground,
barren-hard
and walk into the cool