Poetry review – SOME DARK GOD: Rachel Jeffcoat lets Catherine Balaq’s poems take her into some intriguingly dark places
Some Dark God
Catherine Balaq
V. Press 2026
ISBN: 978-1-0682701-3-0
36pp £7.50
What is it about poetry that makes it the ideal literary vehicle for witchcraft? That incantatory quality of repetition and rhyme; the power in naming things; the way a sparse line can discomfit, cover an ordinary scene in shadow. We should ask Shakespeare, probably – or else Helen Ivory (Constructing a Witch, Bloodaxe, 2024), Fiona Benson (Midden Witch, Jonathan Cape, 2025), Helen Mort (Stepmother, Chatto & Windus, 2026), and other recent poets who’ve chosen the female gothic as inspiration.
To that list we can add Catherine Balaq, whose previous collection Deathless (Verve, 2024) found a dark, compelling beauty in the interplay of sex and death. Her most recent pamphlet, Some Dark God (V. Press, 2026), luxuriates in darkness from the first page, as ‘your bare body’ is found in an abandoned room then cut open, with a ‘very dark god watching’.
Women are frequently watched and dissected in this pamphlet, seen in fragments or body parts: the ‘slack guts’ and ‘slip of thighs’ in “Night Women”, the ‘pinched waist/enthralled in gold’ in “Portrait of Madame X”. Sometimes the effect is a kind of deliberate elusiveness; at others it reads more as gleeful dehumanisation. This latter reaches its peak in the short conversation sequence between Hades and Persephone: the Hades poems appear in bleak parody of a love ballad, reducing Persephone to a ‘bruise’ and repeating ‘my love’ so often it becomes meaningless sound.
I’ll get you wet with want for me.
I’ll make you swell with summer yet.
I’ll taste your salt, your little sea.
I want your pure white hands on me.
The tight, off-kilter rhyme here feels strident, claustrophobic, and a little on-the-nose. My own preference is for the poems that evoke unease and longing more obliquely, such as the bittersweet “My Mother at the Sink”, where the speaker ‘slip[s] out into the garden’ to eat soil in handfuls and remember her mother, ‘wait[ing] for kindness/ to engulf [her]’. The prose poem “You Wait for Me, Father” movingly depicts the anxieties of caring for a parent with dementia, the solid wall of text a gathering weight on the speaker and the reader together. Later, the patient enumeration of worldly goods in “Spell to Raise the Grave Mother” feels like an incantation formed of love.
I enjoyed, too, the way Balaq’s landscapes leer, brood, drip unpleasantly, and otherwise enfold the reader in slippery disquiet, especially in the ekphrastic poems that close the pamphlet. “Anguish”, written after August Friedrich Schenck’s famous depiction of maternal loss, casts a more desolate light on the scene: here ‘stems are scared to bud’, and the mother abandons the ‘worthless birth’ to the crows.
The final poem, “Holding Up the Sky” (after Edward Baird’s surrealist painting Unidentified Aircraft), crawls with ambiguous menace. As in the opening poem, the speakers ‘raise [their] eyes’ to find a god of comfort, and find no one:
even the windows of the church were dark
and snow lay on the fields, untouched.
The red door of a fisherman’s house, closed,
blank as the side of a face.
One can hardly end this poem – and this pamphlet – without needing to take a deep breath: a testament to the poet’s skill in leading the reader confidently into the dark, and then closing the door behind them.
Oct 21 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Catherine Balaq
Poetry review – SOME DARK GOD: Rachel Jeffcoat lets Catherine Balaq’s poems take her into some intriguingly dark places
Some Dark God
Catherine Balaq
V. Press 2026
ISBN: 978-1-0682701-3-0
36pp £7.50
What is it about poetry that makes it the ideal literary vehicle for witchcraft? That incantatory quality of repetition and rhyme; the power in naming things; the way a sparse line can discomfit, cover an ordinary scene in shadow. We should ask Shakespeare, probably – or else Helen Ivory (Constructing a Witch, Bloodaxe, 2024), Fiona Benson (Midden Witch, Jonathan Cape, 2025), Helen Mort (Stepmother, Chatto & Windus, 2026), and other recent poets who’ve chosen the female gothic as inspiration.
To that list we can add Catherine Balaq, whose previous collection Deathless (Verve, 2024) found a dark, compelling beauty in the interplay of sex and death. Her most recent pamphlet, Some Dark God (V. Press, 2026), luxuriates in darkness from the first page, as ‘your bare body’ is found in an abandoned room then cut open, with a ‘very dark god watching’.
Women are frequently watched and dissected in this pamphlet, seen in fragments or body parts: the ‘slack guts’ and ‘slip of thighs’ in “Night Women”, the ‘pinched waist/enthralled in gold’ in “Portrait of Madame X”. Sometimes the effect is a kind of deliberate elusiveness; at others it reads more as gleeful dehumanisation. This latter reaches its peak in the short conversation sequence between Hades and Persephone: the Hades poems appear in bleak parody of a love ballad, reducing Persephone to a ‘bruise’ and repeating ‘my love’ so often it becomes meaningless sound.
I’ll get you wet with want for me.
I’ll make you swell with summer yet.
I’ll taste your salt, your little sea.
I want your pure white hands on me.
The tight, off-kilter rhyme here feels strident, claustrophobic, and a little on-the-nose. My own preference is for the poems that evoke unease and longing more obliquely, such as the bittersweet “My Mother at the Sink”, where the speaker ‘slip[s] out into the garden’ to eat soil in handfuls and remember her mother, ‘wait[ing] for kindness/ to engulf [her]’. The prose poem “You Wait for Me, Father” movingly depicts the anxieties of caring for a parent with dementia, the solid wall of text a gathering weight on the speaker and the reader together. Later, the patient enumeration of worldly goods in “Spell to Raise the Grave Mother” feels like an incantation formed of love.
I enjoyed, too, the way Balaq’s landscapes leer, brood, drip unpleasantly, and otherwise enfold the reader in slippery disquiet, especially in the ekphrastic poems that close the pamphlet. “Anguish”, written after August Friedrich Schenck’s famous depiction of maternal loss, casts a more desolate light on the scene: here ‘stems are scared to bud’, and the mother abandons the ‘worthless birth’ to the crows.
The final poem, “Holding Up the Sky” (after Edward Baird’s surrealist painting Unidentified Aircraft), crawls with ambiguous menace. As in the opening poem, the speakers ‘raise [their] eyes’ to find a god of comfort, and find no one:
even the windows of the church were dark
and snow lay on the fields, untouched.
The red door of a fisherman’s house, closed,
blank as the side of a face.
One can hardly end this poem – and this pamphlet – without needing to take a deep breath: a testament to the poet’s skill in leading the reader confidently into the dark, and then closing the door behind them.