Review: Titch By Kate Marshall Flaherty

Poet Kate Marshall Flaherty’s latest collection, Titch, resonates with the themes and stylistic excellence seen in her previous work. Most of the poems in the book are upbeat and some are joyous. Its tone is reflective, and its imagery is precise and evocative.

The collection’s title Titch – which means a small somebody – is a clever take on the moniker for Little Tich, a famous music hall performer from the turn of the twentieth Century, and a word derived from Australian and British slang. Flaherty’s poems inspire and entertain, however down-to-earth the poet’s subject matter.

The poem, Just a Titch, explains this perspective in tangible, intimate images - “the inch of wine left in the bottle … the amount of chili flakes needed for heat … and when I dip into the credit line, charge extra on the card, skim a bit from bills for treats.” By focusing on the basics and life’s minutiae, the poet uses the small to evoke the big picture. Seen through the author’s magnified lens, even small observations become profound.

Many of the poems show Flaherty’s strong bonds to her family. In Aubade, Flaherty depicts the simple warmth evoked by the scent of her mother’s cup of morning coffee, made “earlier than sun most mornings” by a woman “in the kitchen in her chenille bathrobe.” The poem reflects a daughter’s sweet nostalgia for childhood days when she’d stay home from school with her mother drinking café au lait, “just for today.”

Cap is a moving tribute to the poet’s father that mixes a wealth of small, specific and tender details. “Back to his babies he goes, the peapods and the carrot nubbins, ‘til the lunch he makes for her at one.” Equally tender is Commiserating with Cows, a reflection on timeless connection that wraps up with one of her mother’s down-to-earth truisms, “you know rain is on the way when the cows lie down.”

The imagery in the poem Sel is simple and passionate. “I learned the salt content of tears is the same as blood and the sea—” The book also spotlights the author’s reverence for nature, expressed in the poem Promise, about the beauty of a hidden spring and nature’s enduring cycles of rebirth. “Snap a piece of frozen bulrush and you will see a bit of fluff, sinew stalk but also glistening moisture — a sign.… this sap in stalk, this nest in soggy snow, the unseen ring around the cuticle moon – Nature is leaving traces.”

A few poems express social commentary, including and the danger ended— an allegorical poem inspired by pandemic fears, “in the spine-hair of fear that we might be caught, be tagged, be the next IT and some of us grabbed a youngster by the hand to stuff them safe in a leaf pile.” The strikingly descriptive poem Sword Dance explodes with sentiment over the moves of a dancer who reminds the author of a beloved child.

Titch by Kate Marshall Flaherty, 144 pages, Piquant Press, $20.00