A review of Stars Like Salt by Cathy Altman – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Beatriz Copello

Stars like Salt
by Cathy Altman
Liquid Amber Press
ISBN 978-0-6457130-7-7, softcover, 93 pages, Feb 2024

After reviewing a few poetry books with post-postmodern style poetry, it was a delight and a break to review Stars Like Salt, a beautiful book with lyrical poetry, where the poet, with imagery, says more than what she says with words. The imagery in the poems is rich and powerful and the reader can search for a secret meaning or find their own interpretation. The poems excel in intensity and feeling but not in a dramatic way or with sentimentality.

Stars Like Salt contains five poetry sections.  Altman writes about her life, observing the world around her with simple words and lines. The book is rich with love of the natural world, the human world absorbing and becoming the natural world: birds, trees, the sea, flowers, animals.

Other poems explore war and peace, as in “Ceasefire”:

Only the first peace
works. After that it is
one continuous war
broken only by smoke
broken only by burying
the dead. People speak
different languages but
mean the same, as they
drag bodies onto stretchers
drive them away in armoured cars
deposit them in graves
on the hillside.

There are some sombre poems that explore the past and death but mostly, this is a book that takes the reader through a life journey which echoes women’s wisdom. The poet honours her roots and her past with moments recorded with openness and sensibility. The following poem titled “lacrimae rerum”, which in Latin means “tears of things” (a phrase from the roman poet Virgil) really reverberated for me:

Close of day. Cloud
masses over
the city in the
evening air
a sculpted form
of ash and ochre lit
with white, like
the depths
of a distant nebula.

I love how “lacrimae rerum” opens with a visual image and immediately blends observation with emotional resonance. Like all of Altman poems the imagery is very rich and with meditative and elegiac tones. This poem creates a sense of memory beyond words. Grief becomes tactile with “the pocket handkerchief”. It is impressive the way the poet utilises colour to bind the visual with the emotional.

In the “Preface” the poet explains that many of the poems come out of her experience of long COVID when the world around her became more precious by paying attention and listening to the natural world. The poems are charged with panpsychism, where all things are connected and alive. For example, a tree is a living network its rots talk to fungi, its leaves speak in light and shadow, bark whispers in the wind and if we open enough we can tune into nature like tuning into a radio. I would like to finish this review with the poet’s own words in the “Preface”: “The very act of attending creates meaning and joy. Things outside of us can speak to us of our deepest self and our interconnection.” Stars Like Salt is a beautiful and rich book that had me reading and re-reading many times.

About the reviewer: Dr Beatriz Copello is an award-winning poet, she writes poetry, fiction, reviews and plays. The author’s books are: Women Souls and Shadows, Meditations At the Edge of a Dream, Under the Gums Long Shade, Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria, A Call to the Stars translated and published in China and Taiwan, Witches Women and Words, No Salami Fairy Bread, Rambles, Renacer en Azul, Lo Irrevocable del Halcon (In Spanish), and most recently, The Book of Jeremiah, published in December 2024 by Ginninderra Press.  Copello’s poetry has been published in literary journals such as Southerly and Australian Women’s Book Review and in many feminist publications. The author has participated in international conferences, has taught Creative Writing at W.S.U. and other scholarly institutions, she has read her poetry at Writers Festivals and other poetry events in Australia and overseas. Copello is mentioned amongst the forty “most notable people” graduated from the University of Technology.