RIGHT ON MY OWN – HEART WON

About the Book

Come inside my paper parlour, come and party with my words and visions. There are worlds inside these sheets, whirling around the lens and captured by the eyes. The mind is endless inside these pages that know no walls and no confinements. Here you’ll see love within two syllables or unspoken. Pain is a pose or on pause, you catch it raw or processed – and deletion is an option the mind can encompass inside this space. Open up the door of the book, and walk on in. If there are themes to poetry, the ones here are the classic ones of love, death, longing, memory, and the seduction of language. Photography has been inserted in the book, and at times within the body of the texts, as a contemporary calligraphy device, after the fashion of 20th century concrete poetry, or of 17th century “pattern” or hieroglyphic poems of George Herbert most notably. Emily Dickinson is a major influence, as the author of this book was lecturing on the poetry of the 19th century American writer to postgraduates in Paris and was struck by the boldness of her verse, her highly idiosyncratic punctuation, spacing and capitalizations, which led to literary isolation in her lifetime, and posthumous publication. It seems so obvious that the shape is the substance, the meaning is the form, as words come to life and dance off the pages or collide with each other yet align in their own perfect way, in harmony or agony. I think the reader sees it all very clearly, in these pages too. Right On, My Own- Heart Won. Salomé Baptist Smith helped by her mate, Ken Pate, when the ship hadn’t sailed. Paris, Vendôme. 2016-2025.

About the Author

Salomé Baptist Smith is the pen name of the author of this book, and of some previous ten works of poetry. She writes in French and English both and occasionally translates her own works from one language to the other for publication. She is a lecturer in English and a professional translator currently based in Paris, with a keen interest in Renaissance rhetoric and theatre, in poetics, in noir literature and cinema. More recently, photography has become a focus for study and practice. She tends to see the world in shades of irony, unfamiliar tinges of the grotesque that need relief. The addition of photographs to this work of poetry helps to alleviate the usual bluntness of words, where only the mind peers back at the reader’s thoughts.