The Irish Times Review of ‘One Wanted Thing’, April 14, 2007

Here is clarity and realism, couched in language that is accessible and inventive. The title poem of this collection was nominated for the Forward Best Poem of the Year 2004, and carries all Smyth's hallmarks: precision, linguistic inventiveness and joy:

You come down the steep slope
in a yellow fleece, scattering yellow
like pollen,

Smyth is a skilful portraitist, as comfortable with landscape as she is with the ambivalence of intimate relationships. In Lacan's Idea of Love we see how "Geese tow white stitches/ against the trees, the treeline a snug eyebrow" while in Water the speaker's immersion in water is compared with how

[ . . . ] love should be,
elastic, fluent, so familiar,
you can't tell if you're in it or out of it.

There are moving poems, not the least being those in which the poet describes the aftermath of a car crash in which her parents were injured. The sudden and shocking role reversal in which the child finds herself looking after her parents is well captured in poems such as Chore: "I wondered if he'd seen the blood I swabbed/ from his ears, his bashed scarlet sockets".

Equally compelling and unsentimental is the portrait of the poet, Adrian Fox, felled by a stroke in 2005: "All I could think of for days/ was the fat slug of toothpaste/ the nurse fretted round your teeth". Smyth received much critical acclaim for her debut collection, When the Lights Go Up. On the evidence of One Wanted Thing, she has managed the challenge of the difficult second collection very well indeed.
Nessa O'Mahony

‘One Wanted Thing’ published by Lagan Press Poetry, 80pp. £8.95
www.lagan-press.org.uk

Poetry London Review of The Future of Something Delicate, Autumn, 2006

‘Cherry Smyth’s ‘The Future of Something Delicate’ is grounded in an uncomfortably sensual apprehension of things… Her poems at their best seem to drift, like mist, before suddenly clearing to reveal something entirely, but usually subtly, unexpected….

Just as her words can suddenly transform feelings, so other poems explore the many ways speech or silences can shape us. In “Lone Wolf Language”, a woman, living in “the land where she doesn’t speak the tongue”, finds herself becoming serenely feral, her own tongue “lying less used,/except to eat, sing and lick her lips’, finally coming to hold words ‘with her teeth’. In “Chore” we find a tender reversal of a parental relationship, the ailing father’s power partly restored in a single exclamation:

“I filled the big hospital bath,
lowered him in, his penis a small water flower,
his word as he lay clean for the first time in days
half floating – Magnificent! he said,
the word immense, healthy as the sea…”

As this suggests, psychoanalysis underlies much of Smyth’s approach, coming to the fore in the inwardly focused fairy-tale imagery of ‘Object Relations’, the small explosion of trees, sky and birds in the two stanzas of ‘Lacan’s Idea of Love’ and the vividly patterned Indian imagery of ‘The Trance of Small Gold Flies’, in which a speaker appears to dissolve into the scents and colours of a garden…..This pamphlet suggests an accomplished body of work in the making.’

Wayne Burrows, Poetry London, Autumn, 2006

Published by Smith/Doorstop Books, The Poetry Business, £3.

Diva Magazine
‘The Future of Something Delicate’ * * * * * is a rewarding jewel. Poems full of inventive language, 'the trance of small gold flies', 'I watch from the bottom in earth shoes'. Some poems form stories, others a caught moment that somehow pierces below the surface. A warm thread of compassion runs through the whole collection.
VG Lee

New Hope International Review On-line
‘Smyth’s tone is clear-eyed, precise and experienced in the ways of the emotions. And there is also, more subtly, a sense of sustaining satisfaction at having worked her way into being able to flex and explore her voices.’
Patricia Prime