NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is the stuff of nightmares, only it's real: it's the real world of the mental health system. Of all the groups excluded from the post-modern hedonism of affluent consumerism, none is excluded with such thoroughness as the mentally ill — from: IS THIS THE WAY?:

	In foyer and smoking room
	sat on low green chairs
	are people who have disappeared

	so deep inside themselves
	that now their external presence
	is also not seen.

But of course it isn't all the fault of the system. Maybe some mental patients are just different and should be tolerated by the rest of society, but as Smith eloquently demonstrates, difference breeds fear, and anyway being different shades into being dangerous — to themselves and to others. Many of the "Case Studies" which appear throughout this book are horrifying, and are told in such plain, straightforward language that the horror is intensified.

The mentally ill are invisible and ignored, yet the irony is that they are not left alone. And of course their suffering is real, and equally real are feeling of sympathy and compassion that something ought to be done. But what ought to be done? Maybe we all inhabit our own private world but most of us manage to compromise and reconcile our world with the worlds of most other people, through language, interaction, love, empathy or just necessity. Smith is particularly illuminating in showing how some people find this compromise impossible, and once they are diagnosed as mentally ill, society takes its revenge on them in the form of unspeakable "treatment."

Because the system is contradictory, care decays into cruelty, compassion into corruption. The situation is explained in WE ALL SWIM IN THE ONE SEA, although this one poem necessarily oversimplifies the subtle and complex picture painted by the whole book:

	Psychiatry cannot be isolated
	from the society it serves:
	mental illness is a disease
	primarily of the powerless,
	even suicides seen as symptomatic
	of sociological states, despair
	as a statistic. Because someone
	may be in hospital doesn't mean
	that they are ill: often they are
	assumed to be unwell solely because
	they are in hospital. So do doctors
	and nurses become accomplices to
	insanity, reliant for a living
	upon their own diagnoses.

In his Introduction to DARK TALES, Sam Smith tells us,

These pieces were written to be performed specifically at the Nunney Jazz Café on All Souls Night 2005.

DARK TALES is a themed collection; the poems form a sketched narrative chain, or at least, take several framed shots of a similar subject matter from a number of angles. It's an interesting rediscovery of delight in the process of story. The themed collection fits the dual impulse for the fragment and the whole: one idea multiplied and pursued; the poet slowly building or discovering the whole out of pieces.

Smith has divided his collection into four sets. The volume opens with set 1, in which he establishes the ideas of the book: truth and illusion, fidelity and deception. Smith examines the monsters that arise in sleep and he begins set 1 with a refrain that is repeated (with variations) throughout the sets.

	Within each mind is a well of darkness. 
	Sleep goes there. And, on occasion, 
	when thought strays 
	from the ordinary 
	monsters come scrabbling up 
	out of this well of darkness.

	Mostly those monsters stop
	just out of sight.

The second set turns to a moment of reptilian horror when

	A forked tongue 
	is tasting the air 
	above the lip of the well.

	It has long curved horns, 
	stamps massive hooves 
	as it blunders, 
	smacking its lion's tail 
	on the walls 
	of this one room 
	you are in.

	Here it is the fear, 
	the shame 
	that you daren't, 
	awake, 
	admit to.

 
	Because you are 
	you are Pan, 
	indiscriminate.

	Snuffling and grunting 
	the pig rips open 
	the chest and starts 
	to grub out 
	your child's heart.

Smith moves, in the final pages, from the monsters of nightmares to those of politics. In set 4 we are slowly introduced to the Bush/Blair creature that comes into the poem slowly and beautifully, image by image, until we discover, at the end, that it is

	seeking to make 
	every one of us 
	meat 
	— just meat — 
	meat marching 
	meat shambling 
	off to war. 
	And we don't scream 
	And we don't scream 
	And we don't scream

Throughout DARK TIMES we are warned to maintain our distance, to not become involved with these monsters who know our hidden histories, and yet it is difficult to stay away, for we are beguiled by Smith's imagination, his bizarre forays into exotic and erotic places. The poems are willing to admit ambiguity and contradiction, fear and bravado, confidence and doubt. Smith enacts for us all the difficulties of humanity. And when he asserts at the end, "And we don't scream", we realise that in the political situation, few of us protest or do anything, but meekly accept what our politicians decree is best. At last we understand the force that is behind the book: our acceptance of all those monsters that haunt our nightmares, but not those monsters that dominate our lives.

These poems constitute a major achievement. The razoring pain of their writing screams at the reader through the marks on the page. Smith does it tough, makes no concessions, builds himself no emotional hidey-holes, and faces his monsters all the way. The writing in the poems blows our minds. It took enough for me just to read them. They are too harrowing; taking me to where poetry has no right to go. But when I finished and closed the book, I knew that this, of course, is precisely where poetry must take its readers — to the brink. Such poems, read with the backing of the Nunney Jazz Café band would certainly induce laughter, but there would be an uncertainty, an ambiguity in the laughter.

Although many of the poems here have an undoubted worthiness, there is, it must be said, a strange and rather off-putting preface to this collection of eighty-odd poems. Explaining the title of the collection, Sam Smith villifies Ilfracombe and Devon as being peopled by

landowners, forelock tuggers and petty criminals.

Concerned only with the shortsighted satisfaction of their own selfish needs and desires, with everyone (with the exception of those few I call my friends) primarily out for their own ends, protecting their own interests, everything in Devon is exploitable.

A people sidelined by linear history they live lives important only to themselves, while of their own life's value they're not too sure; moving on, never to belong anywhere, except in their own childhood, with maybe its attic scent of crisp newspaper and softly ripening apples

	Whole lives are divided by a sleep:
	behold now
	the astonishing delicacy, not only
	of our own lived lives, but of all
	that inter-acts; and how we
	endure

The ebb and flow of life, its temporality and impermanence, are the slight, yet sole limits of what defines existence, as expressed in PULSE-TAKER OUT OF TOUCH:

	To movement we assume life, to life
	reason of a kind, at least
	a rationale. The push of waves to
	shore, though, is patently mindless.
	Yet each breaking wave does
	ask a question of the shore.

	In storm's dawn, within the shelter
	of this wall of houses, a blackbird
	flutes his affirmation:

	we are both still here,

	temporary
	in a temporary place,

	we are both still here.

	Contemptuous of all engineered excitements my life experience
	is no stream of consciousness, more an enclosing mist. But how
	to convey that state of partial awareness, voices off
	not quite heard?

Other poems indulge in fairly blatant, bald bouts of philosophizing without bothering to paint a pretty poetical context, as in A IS FOR ABSCISSION:

	note how humanity's capacity for creation is
	matched only by its propensity for destruction.

People will eventually live each in their square — eat, clean, think their thoughts — each within their room's subdivision.

			Finite
	in an infinite universe,
			how can we belong?

	Out in the lanes, en route
	to a gig

		a life within one of those squared buildings,
	4 or 5 storeys high,
	centre of any European city and
	whose facade bespeaks
	bourgeois solidity

		wind-tumbled leaves,
	fantasy's creatures

		Do I exist?
		Alone in the house
	I listen to the rooms talking to themselves.

		Over the damp precinct,
	across the blue sky, a vapour trail is
	disintegrating into a zip.
		Those eyes, that have
	looked up, wait for the sky to peel apart
	and reveal the blackness beyond.

		One future
		could be foretold
	in this butchery of trees,
	in the amputated limbs
	and truncated trunks
	leaking beaded circles and
		treacle globes of sap.