What love would smell like

“In SK Grout's debut pamphlet, romantic love between women is both sensual and spiritual. These atmospheric, compelling poems evoke a richly felt and observed sensibility, an experience to relish again and again,  ‘bright full of starwild’.”
Carrie Etter

“What love would smell like expertly zeroes in on the sensual and vibrant rhythms of the body. Porches, couches, cafés and twilit streets are reinvented as poignant sites of intimacy and want. Savouring colour, light, and the ‘sweet, blistered pleasure’ of scent, SK Grout has created an enchanting ‘poetry of simmering’.”
Natalie Linh Bolderston

What love would smell like is very beautiful and very beguiling.

ISBN: 978-1-8380488-7-7

34 pages

R.R.P. £6.50

A Poetry School Poetry Book of the Year 2021!

A sample poem from What love would smell like can be enjoyed below.

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What love would smell like (with p&p options)

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To Katerina

even in another time

I will buy too many books

and you will get tattoos of

the eclipse of the moon

etched into the skin beneath

your wrist bones;

I will drink coffee, I will drink tea

and you will bathe in the

first light of the winter sun

spread across the living room floor

like an eagle cradling flight;

I will respond to all emails,

“Sorry it’s late”; and you will

collect juniper berries, periwinkle shells,

cry over oxidised lava rocks burnt black, 

press cornflower petals into books

you will never read;

I will stay home, you will tree-pose;

I will listen to Chopin’s polonaises,

you will dream ferocious big,

think jazz blue,

lap in an endless pool of innovation;

someone, I tell you,

will remember us – you nod: the Internet,

credit history and our names in the sand

 

first published in Banshee Lit

REVIEWS

"It’s this same mix of the personal and the profound that resounds throughout SK Grout’s collection, along with sounds, sights, and sensory language that brings them evocatively to life. [...]  The sensual and the stellar therefore come together in this collection; and as the “rowr” of the bear intimates there’s a refreshing, original style to the writing, too, making this, to quote from the book, “an endless pool of innovation” [...]"
Mab Jones, Buzz, full review here.

"The poems in this debut collection are filled with love and longing, delivered in a calm, wistful tone. It’s a romantic, gentle publication. The female body is always present, often wrapped in sensuous, languid language communicating tenderness and intimacy."
Tamsin Hopkins, Sphinx, full review here.

"Each poem invents its own form with the result that the poems are very fresh. They jump off the page. SK Grout does a wonderful job with this and what I enjoyed most was her ability to hold us in the moment."
Anne Bailey, Sphinx, full review here.

"These are tender poems, rich in intertextual images.[…] Grout handles form and content with dexterity and a lightness of touch.[…] These poems of love, desire, and loss create an intimate portrayal of female love. ‘Ursa Minor’ describes home as ‘a place like/ Sunday morning coffee and two opposite words/ pushed together to make something delicious// and startling’. This description can equally be applied to Grout’s evocative pamphlet."

Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, issue 6