1 review for Never Good at Maths

1. 

   IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) – 18.07.2023

   This is the debut collection of an already published and awarded writer with a well-developed poetic style, and a strong awareness of how language and form work together to convey meaning. To read Kate Maxwell’s poems in Never Good at Maths is to enter a world of social conscience, of ironic humour and satire at the expense of pretentiousness, privilege and inhumanity, and to listen to the not-so-small personal voice of the poet. A recurrent device is that of poetic ventriloquy, of subject matter spoken through a persona, to both distance the poet and reinforce her stance. In each case, Maxwell’s language invokes the spoken idiom to good effect.

   The opening poem, “Crossing Borders”, showcases some of the poet’s imagistic and descriptive skills: “where power lines/stretch like spider silk/across this never end.” The heart of the poem lies in the metaphor of the connectedness between landscape and lovers, in the second stanza:

   Caught in the driver’s window
   white muscular clouds
   paint a silver-edged halo
   about your nose and jaw.
   Right now I’d drive with you
   into forever.

   The eponymous “Never Good at Maths”, another wry love poem, uses mathematical metaphors so well it negates its own title:

   You’re content with tested
   calculations, yet
   I’ve noted fear and confusion
   in the furrows of your brow
   the grey flecks of your eyes
   when equations crumble.

   “I Could Have Been a Contender” speaks with the failed voice of a woman retired into comfortable domesticity:

   Are you listening?
   I plead silently from the board.
   Can you hear my creativity winding down?
   Each year they learn a little
   wear me down a lot and I am tired of scrubbing at rocks
   to make gemstones.

   In this poem, the volte-face of its conclusion reveals the further punishment of a little self-knowledge:

   I could have been a contender
   I mumble rebelliously
   to my old self that never was.
   But she doesn’t believe me.

   “Boss of the Sandpit”, with its unstated reference to Donald Trump (“So you start building a wall…”), exemplifies Maxwell’s ironic ventriloquy, allowing the protagonist no room for self-knowledge or empathy:

   Let’s make the sandpit great again,
   drive Tonka Trucks through
   those stupid single bucket castles
   with their dumb stick fences, plastic goats
   and sheep. We’ll make a huge castle instead,
   the biggest, best one of all.
   Nobody makes castles like me.

   In its exploration of everyday characters and scenarios, whether with sharp-edged wit or fellow-feeling, the poems in Never Good at Maths will strike a chord with readers, requiring them to re-assess many current issues.

   – Margaret Bradstock, author of Brief Garden

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