Bycatch

Caroline Smith trained as a sculptor at Goldsmiths College. She now lives in Wembley where she works with refugees. Her previous collection, The Immigration Handbook was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and translated into Italian. Smith is widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Poetry Review, The Spectator and Staying Alive (Bloodaxe). Her work has been shortlisted or won prizes in the Keats/Shelley, Indigo Dreams and The Alpine International poetry competitions. She has given readings at festivals and universities around the world, including Aldeburgh, Cardiff, Ledbury, Columbia and Michigan universities. Set to music by the British Argentinian composer Silvina Milstein, her poetry has been performed by the BBC Singers. She is a 2025 Hawthornden Fellow. www.carolinesmithpoet.com

‘In Bycatch Caroline Smith has created a remarkable journal of care and its complex narratives, composed throughout with striking clarity of image and compassionate observation. These finely resonant poems show us how the worlds of capacity and apparent incapacity exist all in the same moment - her ageing parents’ house ‘like an unlocked church’, generous and vulnerable; her father’s shoe, unrecognised by him, ‘like a tugboat guiding him through the fog’; and most joyfully of all his un-anchored language ‘high up in the roof of the cloud forest/ broken free of the ground.’