Dangerous Cakes

Poetry. In these succinct and deceptively simple poems, Smith makes dancing and wine-glasses and summers gone into emblems of longing and lasting, with marvellous eldritch conviction. There is sweet (not over- sweet) nostalgia here, and wit, as well as a gleam of malevolent knowing peeping through the damask. What does it know? That the delightful parties do not go on forever.--Zachary Bos



Elspeth Smith's poems are indeed 'dangerous cakes'; tiny parcels of benign delightfulness with danger at their centres. A patch of grass, a fresh covering of snow, an old shoe box take a sinister turn if you dare to join the party.--Lorraine Mariner