Kate Potts has previously published a pamphlet, Whichever Music, and appeared in the Bloodaxe anthology of new poets, Voice Recognition, in which she was one of the stand-out writers. Pure Hustle is her debut collection and will not disappoint those who have previously encountered her work. Those for whom Pure Hustle is their first experience of Potts’ writing will find a poet with a keen and sensitive ear, combined with a wide-ranging imagination.

In the poem ‘Un-History’ she calls herself a “cataloguer of behaviour, as if an interloper at a zoo”, and this is certainly one aspect of her writing: the poem ‘Homemaking’ concerns a Polish housewife living in Britain receiving a call from home, while ‘Reel’ describes the eccentric, possibly senile, actions of a grandfather. Yet, this is far from the only thing that Potts catalogues. The subjects range from vivid descriptions of urban landscapes, to fantasy worlds such as ‘Second Skin’ which combines sci-fi with a satire on beauty products. There is a chant of negation on the subject of insomnia: “I’ll envision no sheep, no floss of beach surf // welled on sand”, and a poem in which the mother of miscarried twins describes the lost with tender care, saying she “let them slip and find their gravity too soon”. Transformations abound, ranging from milk “troubled to butter in marmalade jars”, to a weak god granted uncertain powers in the poem ‘The Runt’, which unfolds with such assurance and ease that it feels like the re-telling of an age-old myth, though to my knowledge it is Potts’ invention.

As a technician Potts shares certain characteristics with later Plath; there is a lyric intensity: “Ignite at the eye’s cool centre, haul the onioned iris / wider – wormhole gnawing at blue – tight witness.”, and a similar reliance on sonic links, such as assonance, “The single, pinned rift”, in lieu of regular end rhymes. However, despite some emotionally intense poems, Pure Hustle is on the whole more playful than Plath. This is to some extent reflected in the way Potts toys with the very units of language, with neologisms and noun-to-verb shifts: “The coals sigh, weird us with their shocks of summer heat.”, “we flux the spidered lines”. At times this evident delight in language threatens to over-power sense, and the writing is certainly more ‘elevated’ than ‘speech’. That said, for a debut collection this is a remarkably assured piece of work, with a number of poems that have the confidence and skill of a far more experienced writer. Kate Potts is certainly a writer to watch.

Bookmark to