Kathy Kituai is an award-winning poet, editor and judge from Canberra who is well known for running workshops and retreats in both tanka and longer forms of poetry. Her collection, The Art of Catching Jam Before it Burns: New & Selected Poems, was published by Interactive Press in 2024.

At 185 pages, The Art of Catching Jam Before it Burns is a substantial body work comprising 70 pages of new poetry plus selected work from six of Kathy’s previous collections. The book showcases Kathy’s writing over the period 1992 to 2023.

Kathy’s poems range through free verse, prose poems, tanka, tanka prose and haibun, while her subject matter includes the beauty of nature, the magic of chance encounters, struggling to find your place in a cross-cultural marriage and coping with the loss of loved ones.

Kathy’s writing offers joyful, bubbly language such as these closing lines from her prose poem titled What’s a Cup of Coffee?

What’s a cup of coffee without poetry, life without metaphor, bittersweet chocolate chipped prose when that’s all there is to sweeten the day?

Other poems show Kathy’s ability to capture the beauty of nature using original metaphor, such as in this opening stanza from her free verse poem titled Crocus:

So brave the crocus,
delicate flowers that grow
through days of scuttling leaves
startled as rabbits in the wind

Still others demonstrate an ability to convey depth of meaning with just a few words, such as these lines from the tanka sequence titled For Those Who Fall:

faded flowers
trodden underfoot
after falling
he lay where he fell
in a far-away field

The three extracts above (all taken from the New Poems section of the book) show the kind of confident, poetic language Kathy can bring to subjects both light and dark – a skill she executes in multiple genres.

But, as I’ve said, this is a substantial collection. And these are poems of substance. Including long, serious poems addressing issues of struggle and loss. Which means short extracts don’t properly convey the impact of this writing.

I therefore offer this longer extract from And the sameness, a poem about the death of Kathy’s adored brother:

Look how easily
her cat hides his claws

Look how easily she fears
her letters are ignored
until her brother’s illness is confirmed

Look how she compares his affliction
to black holes

and the sameness of skies overripe with storms
and plums squashed at the base of the tree

and the sameness of the equinox in winter
and darkness imploding in his diagnosis

and the sameness of saplings
bending backwards in sudden squalls

and two sisters keening
Christmas cards cradled in their lap

and the wind howling through a graveyard
the cat leaping as the limb it’s crouched on

snaps.

Not only is this writing packed with images and metaphor, but the rhythm and repetition are effective in communicating the writer’s distress and despair to the reader. The poem is memorable both for the pictures painted and for the honest portrayal of emotion.

While the previous poem was about the end of a life, the following lines are about the beginning of a relationship. Here is an extract from The Brooch:

so I swear Shirley to secrecy at the back of the bike shed
tell her
how I want to pin your gift to a scarf
or place it in my hair,
capture shy heady things
and yet I can’t find the words
to tell my mother that the boy
ten houses down our street, isn’t just my brother’s
best friend . . . he’s someone
I don’t quite understand

For 30 years, Kathy Kituai’s poetry has captured the beauty of nature and friendship, but also the pain of hardship and loss. The Art of Catching Jam Before it Burns takes the reader on a journey through time, calling at all these places along the way.

You can purchase The Art of Catching Jam Before it Burns by Kathy Kituai direct from the publisher, Interactive Press. Please use this link.