Brave Faces & Other Smiles

Beth Calverley

• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912565887
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

'… I told you / I really like your smile./ And to my surprise/ you gave it to me.'

This astonishing debut by Beth Calverley takes the umbrella theme of the smile and shares it out – with great generosity and care - among a multiplicity of subjects, moods and meanings. Smiles can be brave, shy, sad, or a lighthouse beam of joy. They can be a mess of countless other things.

This subject seems so appropriate to a poet whose presence, way of reaching out to every member of her audience, and most of all her smile, seem to create smiles all around her. Her leaps of imagination take the breath away. Her use of recurring imagery draws a safety-net of light around her listeners and readers.

Some of the smiles that inspired poems in this collection are contributed by people whom Beth has met on her adventures with The Poetry Machine. These poems are worthy of your great attention. We dare you not to smile as you read.

'This is a rich, absorbing, heart-warming collection, sensitive to life's pleasures and pains. Beth Calverley makes us attend differently to ordinary things - a single look can be 'a glass of cold water', a room 'a tangle / of buttery light', a smile 'a too- / tight scrunchy'. We should all smile more, and we should all read more poetry. This collection covers all bases!' - Helen Mort

Content Warning

Go gently. This collection is home to all kinds of smiles. Many of the poems in the collection look at how smiles adapt to challenging times as well as positive ones. They explore experiences of mental ill-health, physical ill-health, grief, loss and trauma as well as joy and connection. There is a full list of content warnings at the start of the book and Beth will share CWs during the event.

Teatimes

‘Suddenly there was a ring at the door’ – Judith

Kerr, The Tiger Who Came To Tea

1.

Tiger,

you came to tea,

delivered in a doorbell

that filled our forks with pause.

Mummy got the door.

You dodged her legs, a confident guest

I scooped to my chest like a promise.

Mummy was worried.

She’d heard of tigers eating homes,

whole, from households –

but she was a fresh track back from hospital,

hunted by hurt,

legs preyed upon by shakes,

weak-winged healing,

tumble of bird.

So, Tiger, we fed you.

At teatimes, you sipped from my saucer,

ate from my plate, craving a taste.

Pink licked milk from fingers

grateful to trade

for a friend, at last,

to tame school’s wildness;

a purr I packed under jumpers,

muffled from eyes,

lunch never lonely

with you by my side.

In bartered bites, your lies enlarged

to fill our mirror.

You gobbled the girl in the glass,

starved of pride by pilfered dinners.

Patterns we’d grown for stealth

were hard to hide.

At last,

the ground hinged its jaws

to size me up for your feast.

My face tasted floor,

no more than a morsel

spat from blackness,

mauled to exhaustion.

2.

Mummy’s roar comes

forceful and foreign.

She takes us to a tamer

famed for caging tigers

in rooms with strange clocks.

He says:

The trick to survive

is to try and describe

how it arrived –

when tea times turned tables into fables.

Time shifts its hands in our laps,

paws at my throat,

your tail a pendulum

ticking forbidding.

I ache to stop –

just hold my tongue

‘til you dissolve me.

But Mummy is right to worry;

my body

a house gulped hollow,

ghost-riddled home,

poem of bones.

3.

So I spill the tale of The Tigress

Poached In The Night:

my spasm-grabbed mother,

her body a hand I held with my heart,

her face a prayer in my palms.

In spite of shaking,

came her brave smile – a straight line

that drew my pledge

to care for her cub,

my cuddle of brother,

safe in his feather den,

stalking dreams.

He didn’t hear the doorbell

that swallowed her whole:

honed medical tones,

jungle of footsteps,

pounce of headlights.

All these knives

found our dead night.

I watched long after she’d gone – wide open –

the promise scooped tight to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Content Warning
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Spellbound
• Wriggle
• Eye Test
• Hindsight is a Playground Water Fountain
• Early
• Sing-Along
• Measuring
• Jack-in-the-Box
• Lavender
• Now you see it, now it’s...
• Keeping Busy
• Activist
• Enter!
• The Problem of Solving
• Baddies
• Who is it for?
• I’ll Hide, You Seek
• Teatimes
• The Girl with Feet for Teeth
• 11 Weeks Since the Accident
• A Climb Too Far
• Meeting an Acquaintance on an Anxious Day
• In Formation
• How many reasons do you have to smile?
• Chickpeas con Chorizo for Thanksgiving
• At the Birthday Party
• Sketch
• Crying in Front of the TV
• Service with a Smile
• The Startling Impact of Shoes
• Keep Searching
• A Distant Signal Flickers
• S i mile
• After School
• First Class
• A Solo Rescue Mission to Weston-Super-Mare
• Falling Over at the Festival
• Face-Planting
• Prototypes
• The Politics of Washing Up
• Sexy Recycling
• On Indecision
• Life Experience
• Dancing on the Patio
• Baby Steps
• The Umbrella Debate
• Clifftops
• Thankyous
• About Verve Poetry Press