Supreme Being

Following her prize-winning first collection, Martha Kapos again captures an extraordinary range of perceptions and emotion. Her style is highly original, a sort of internal Cubism, conveying a feeling-state by observing it precisely through many sharply nuanced images and from many angles. She creates a very distinctive, unique atmosphere – graver here than in her previous collection. Supreme Being is both a huge hymn of praise for ‘life’, for ordinary experiencing, and at the same time faces very movingly and directly the incomprehensibility of loss – the loss of someone else, deeply known and loved, and the awareness, too, of the coming loss of the poet’s own ‘experiencing’: themes as grave and profound as can be imagined. These are the substance of religious feeling and – without overt religious referencing – Supreme Being earns its bold title. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation