Kimberly Campanello

Kimberly Campanello's most recent poetry collection An Interesting Detail is published by Bloomsbury Poetry. Her debut novel Use the Words You Have is the inaugural title from Somesuch Editions, the imprint of BAFTA and Oscar-winning production company Somesuch.

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For Anthony Vahni Capildeo

INFERNO 9

EUTERPE Susan Stanford Friedman Keynote, University of York

Poets’ Crumble on Old Chain Pier, Our Lady's Port of Grace

Lands of Loyal Hotel / Ramsay’s doubled footprint estate couching Duncan’s HD tratturo, Alyth

Dunnet, Gallaibh / Among the Strangers

May 2025

ARGOMENTO

Such speaking through the master works. As acronym for a single voice choir.

Such savouring of crumbled insides. Is good for you. To share on a shoreline.

Some say watch out for verbs.

Some say chaining words to words in lieu of the word you can’t find is a classic sign.

Some say rounding words with words is the only way anything at all ever arrives.

Let alone on time.

A flower stand made from a tune for the dead is not a crime. Even if to be steadied it expurgates a line.

Nor is looking up and around and asking who to fear and ignoring the reply.

No song is forever complete. No style entirely suffices.

Pins distressed under the weight of dead cells. Hair flies.

All that’s said about winding down devotional times. Repurposing spaces.

Notecarded. Scanned. Subdivided.

Make no mistake relinquishing vital rounding before it’s melted in.

Taste it. Raised up for tongued sharp instant.

Waves ghost suffering sweetness for one thing.

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CANTO

I follow their sharp typeface with my pale grey slants.

I read past speech to speak of what’s read.

In foggiest fog. It’s palimpsest. Triumph. Of fear.

Of claims. Of purpose. I sweat and pale. I get red.

I flake out. I shape what meaning there is for the hell

of it. See below above. Neither nor hopelessness.

Cells retreat as the anti-verb says. It’s rare as always.

Rare as it ever was. Well. Who cares. It’s a deep well. And.

It’s sad. He said. They said. She said. I again and again.

Saying as such won’t cut it. Hairy twist of road scored

with spun limbs to power mills for eventual pills to run

fingers furying this phrase here. Plump super receptors.

Hell that is actually now and meanwhile is everywhere.

This is my interior. Strained through verses by versus

tapped out by talons. Painted. Winds touching warm waters

get wildest so to scream. This. Which already sounds again.

Piled up deleafed branches. Are. Related. To each other.

To shepherd. To creatures. To all. Related. All to fleeing.

All sepulchred. Well go ahead. Proverb it. Star and cell.

No name. Same origin. Nerve says I saw it. Our master

works intellect every moment. Your eye is foaming.

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COMMENTO

The poet K goes up high and then higher to islands beyond estuaries beyond rivers beyond lands beyond towns with names that if sounded in the language of this poet sound out numbers. Sound the words that order births or successions and below firsts.

In the house of experts of what’s past the poet K takes a book down. A book on dwelling. She’s gentle with it. The book opens to the middle as if on purpose. There it is. The flat table of land, its villages, its ditches, its homes. A section on sound. A section on smells. A section on moving creatures and the distances and how they were monitored by whistles and high voices before metal and so bells.

Out the window from where the poet K is reading the land opens out to the past’s arrivals. Arrivals coming and coming whenever and as whomever they are. Arrivals described at one time not by their name but by a phrase.

That phrase is a practice. It’s saying a word without saying it, a word you know or one absented. You go around it and around it. You convey it but don’t speak it. And so you say and understand it.

The practice is the way of poetry and movement of people and creatures and songs and whistles.

Declining yet making. The way the poet K goes along shaping the land and her life though she loses more cells.

Skins and skins of it and pages and pages and phrases and phrases still riding these winds.

This way is a symptom of a heady problem grown more common.

The poet K knows this.

Yet the poet K wonders if this way is treated more gently and we speak of it as it’s speaking to us, it might be taken up or take us up.

Taking up on purpose works like antidote to poison.

 As all words we begin with once began.

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PURGATORIO 7

Meanwhile with stone timeline from moon landing to the village of Skara Brae

Passing Places & Blockships of Scapa Flow

Italian Chapel Lamb Holm & St Magnus Cathedral Kirkwall

Orcadia - Arcadia

May - June 2025

ARGOMENTO

Out of this world feet down steps taken. In these islands a lifeboat crew gone down. Out of this world back down a man. In these islands no more news to be printed. A way to speak on air is made a possession. In these islands a great bone drifted in. A page signed says free from free to life is. In these islands a man dies inside. A civilisation all-capped in one rounded year. In these islands a man floated back from a new found land. War over places to encounter whatever beyond there is. In these islands disease claims the white hand. The name of he who started it repeats at the end. In these islands art is like artists or artists are like creatures and they feasted on the contents of over 18,000 shells. A universal parturition. In these islands no one mentions it.

In these islands stones and stones and

relationships.

A long wall ripples.

In these islands stone shelves stone

hearths stone beds.

A temple built. And another.

In these islands stone rooms

and rooms of stones.

A great entrance past ditches. A great

feasting. Stones circle. Bones.

Stripped.

In these islands the same but also more also before there then.

Sharp angles rise for the dead in

deserts.

In these islands a room for stone alone.

In these islands this village. The sea comes in.

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CANTO

To whom do you belong a gladder

welcome than where are you from

and why have you come. Reply with

a location. Bones through the gate

at the entrance the first row forever

in that eternal disappeared wall.

Names could be iron. Which is written.

And forest dove. Which is not.

Dates missing or never there at all.

The voice in this one leans toward

heaven meaning living down distance.

Inviting self over again and in wording

hope for eventual hugs. However I’m moved

it’s more than a sum of all the day’s doings.

Absence of wind. Unexpected sun.

Rare artefact in hand. Ships sunk

with purpose left to memorise old wars.

I’m with the dead children. Long gone

just taken. Time taken in phrases.

Outrage sighs simply to say true

believers kill others as signs. The voice

in this one says no to orbits drawing

borders in big skies. This voice is

trenchant. Digs deep though in confines. 

What is inherited is that well. Read.

Pain caused. Pain lifted. Try the first.

Die forever. Try the other. Belong

to why doing. Knowing well.

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COMMENTO

The poet K is driven in this vehicle. She passes passing places. In which some yield.

A field walk to a house within a house within a mortared shield.

Grass waves. Trees bend. Poor signals.

Stationing in others’ key places is how you begin.

Stations in a cathedral raised by invaders.

Stations in a chapel built by prisoners.

Death is reclining.

Death is spelled out.

Bones are boxed and columned.

Bones disperse across the surface as their holder spreads out.

A bull’s wings angle the book’s being done phrases.

A bull’s rippling muscles charge with brave fear.

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