Francesca Bell (Bright Stain) writes poems that chime like the bell of her own name: bright but resonant, sharp but still familiar, lush and likely to echo long after its initial strike. What Small Sound is Bell's second collection, and it brings together a haunting yet beautiful set of poems centered on the losses--or potential for them--that encircle her: the loss of her hearing; the mental health concerns that threaten the loss of her daughter; and the loss, too, of a general sense of safety, wrought by Covid-19, parenting, and aging. Despite these losses, and the fear and heaviness that accompany them, Bell writes poems that insist pain is only one part of every story.
The opening poem, "Jubilations," strikes fast and hard with "Every two minutes, an American woman is raped" and follows with references to mass shooters and the tensions of wealth and destruction. It concludes, however, with an imagined prayer: "Thank You for this world of green grass and suffering." A similar tangle of emotions accompanies many of the poems, most poignantly in "Becoming," a short poem that begins, "Once, I was a whole person." After noting her transformation "through trauma," the final lines make clear the nature of that change: "After, the doctor placed the baby/ among my body's wreckage./ I learned to call this love." In so many ways, Bell chronicles the inevitability of suffering in a world full of love, and readers will appreciate her unflinching gaze and radiant images. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian