Book Review: Watching For Smoke, by Helen Heath

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.

Paekakariki poet Helen Heath’s chapbook Watching for Smoke, recently published by Seraph Press and available from Seraph Press or on Etsy, is a beautiful package both inside and out, with its card cover featuring an inserted knitting needle and its coloured and textured end-papers.

The epigraph to Watching for Smoke is:

Family is a waiting fuse
watching for smoke.

Family is the subject of these poems: partners, children, parents, seen from the point of view of a daughter, a lover, a parent. Parents are ambiguously loved figures, sometimes too close, sometimes too far away, their lives brought into perspective by their daughter’s giving birth to and caring for children of her own:

The hills are my father
with a shotgun
as I write you a letter. (“Evidence”)

my mother’s brow, her heavy lids,
there, in my new daughter.
I am home now and she will leave me. (“Homing”)

I enjoyed the precision of the language and the viewpoint in these poems. The language is subtle, appropriate to the subject matter, well chosen. And the viewpoint is equally precise: each poem takes a stance, while not denying the right of other stances to exist.

“How We Disappear” both ends and summarises the chapbook, its nine short stanzas thumbnails of a woman’s life moving through time. I think it’s the best poem in “Watching for Smoke”, but I enjoyed each of the eleven poems, and only one, “Infallible Father”, did not quite possess the satisfying completeness which is a hallmark of the other ten.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I like “Watching for Smoke” a lot. It has been produced in a limited edition of 100 hand-bound copies. There are copies still available. I recommend that you get one soon, and watch out for Helen Heath’s first full collection when it appears.