Review of Wordsmith
In “Wordsmith”, the poet turns the lens inward, offering a meditation not only on love and human connection, but on the craft of writing itself — and more specifically, the particular burden and gift of being one who feels deeply and distils those feelings into verse.
It opens in familiar territory: the cyclical search for meaningful connection.
“I’ve met my soulmate a million times before / In this pub, or that bar / In this club, or that café”
These lines carry both humour and fatigue — a wry recognition that soul connection, when filtered through the noise of modern life, becomes harder to pin down, harder to trust. There’s an echo of Flashback here — that same feeling of romantic déjà vu, the sense of being caught in a loop of desire and disappointment.
But the poem quickly moves into more reflective waters, offering insight into the writer’s own role in this endless emotional theatre:
“Empathy! The poet’s message / Of loves lost, or found / Of promises kept, broken or bound”
Here, the speaker recognises their own position not just as participant, but as observer, witness, and translator. The wordsmith is someone who feels everything twice — once in the moment, and again in the quiet hours afterwards, when experience is turned over, examined, and offered back to the world in poetic form.
There’s a striking passage that encapsulates this recursive process:
“Through experience rewound, spat out / Chewed and reviewed”
This line lands like truth. It captures the raw, almost uncomfortable nature of artistic introspection — how the poet must digest life not once but repeatedly, extracting meaning from memory, even when it hurts.
Yet this isn’t self-indulgence. It’s service.
The ultimate purpose of this inner labour is laid out plainly:
“So that everyone can comprehend and extend / Compassion’s threefold trinity / Comprising sympathy, empathy and compathy.”
The introduction of compathy — a lesser-known term, beautifully defined in the footnote — offers a poignant expansion to the poem’s emotional vocabulary. Sympathy is understanding from the outside. Empathy, from alongside. But compathy goes further — to feel with, to share the same heart. It’s a rare and radical kind of emotional attunement, and it reflects the highest aim of the poet’s craft: to create a space where emotional truth is not only seen, but felt — collectively.
Summary of Themes
At its core, Wordsmith is about the emotional responsibility of the poet — not as entertainer, but as empathic translator of human experience. It explores how the poet’s sensitivity becomes both burden and gift, curse and calling.
The recurring imagery of repetition — meeting soulmates again and again, rewriting the same emotional patterns — speaks to a modern longing for authenticity in a world of distractions. And yet, the poem resists cynicism. There’s wisdom in this speaker. They understand that to write, and to feel deeply, is to serve a greater good: the building of bridges between hearts.
Conclusion
“Wordsmith” is a clear, compact, and quietly luminous poem that elegantly captures what it means to be a deeply feeling writer in an overstimulated world. It’s a small poem with big resonance — not just for writers, but for anyone who has ever struggled to make sense of their emotions, or to articulate what lives quietly beneath the noise.
What continues to impress across this body of work is the poet’s remarkable ability to balance the intimate with the universal — to craft poems that are deeply personal, yet immediately recognisable in their emotional truth.
This piece, like many in the collection, is a gift — not only in its insight, but in its willingness to speak plainly, kindly, and courageously about what it means to be human.
To have empathy is to be able to put yourself in another’s shoes, whereas to have compathy is to feel their emotions as if you share the same heart.
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