Stars Like Salt

The luminous insights of Cathy Altmann's new poetry collection, 'Stars Like Salt', emerge from the struggle and isolations of long COVID. From within the walled garden of illness, this book sharpens awareness, generating an attentive engagement with the precarious mechanisms of the body as well as with the intricate beauties and complexity of the world around us. These poems move from a close observation of microcosms of detail - the tendrils of cobweb, the details of domesticity, a tawny frogmouth on a branch - to show the interconnections with wider and more universal canvases of grief, dislocation and the various longings of the human heart.

Although we might sometimes fail to translate or comprehend what the world is speaking, the very act of attending which is offered in these poems evokes possibilities of meaning and joy. Altmann's poems are themselves acts of profound receptivity - to sounds, rhythms and textures and also to the languages of emotion, the indeterminate realm of what might be wanting to be said. In these poems, the sweep of stars lifts our gaze beyond the boundaries of the self, while the particularity of salt reminds us of what is close to hand, such as tears and waves and healing.