'metalsmith' by Karan Chambers

'my body: hammer / & metal, all at once.'

Featured author: Karan Chambers

This week, I’m fortunate enough to be sharing an unpublished poem by Karan Chambers. Her work is visceral, bold and frequently witty, testing out new relationships with form (multiple choice questionnaires and diagnostic checklists - ACTUAL forms). It is full of impossible encounters: Courtney Love, the Furies at a high school reunion… I got to know Karan’s work through mentoring and I love the way she tells embodied female experience slant. I’ll share her biog and then the poem (‘metalsmith’) and a few reflections on it.

Karan Chambers (she/her) is a poet, tutor, and former English teacher. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at UEA and is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. She has poems in Poetry London, The London Magazine, The Rialto, 14 Magazine, The Aftershock Review, and The Stinging Fly. Karan is the winner of the 2025 Katrina Collins Poetry Prize, she was Highly Commended in the 2023 Cheltenham Poetry Competition, and Runner-Up in the 2024 Classical Association Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet ‘woman | folk’ is available from Salò Press and her second pamphlet is forthcoming with Atomic Bohemian. She lives in Surrey with her husband and three lively children.

metalsmith

three times we drove through
that formless darkness, thick
with possibility. each time, headlights
flashing: beaten copper plating
a black-shaft road, & i, gripping
hard to the bellows, breathing

the baby down. then the rush
to bright fire & heaving forge, heat
& sweltering steelwork. the hiss
of water on molten limbs. my body: hammer
& metal, all at once. anvil-firm, muscles

a white-tempering crucible. & when,
at last, the babe was placed newly-cast
on my chest, i wondered if i was the maker
or the made.

‘Three times we drove…’ - the specificity is intriguing. So much more interesting as a way into a poem than just ‘we drove through…’. Then the metalwork imagery begins (the title has already suggested it to us) and makes things strange and stranger, from the way the light meets the road to the scene inside the car.

A central or guiding metaphor in a poem generally wins me over if it defamiliarises an object or experience but in a way we can gesture or extrapolate towards from where we stand as reader. Imagery that seems novel, but not novel for the sake of it. That’s how bellows and forge and anvil and all the other concepts from the world of the metalsmith work here. ‘My body; hammer / and metal, all at once’ - I can’t paraphrase why that clicks for the experience of giving birth, it just DOES.

I like the way this poem uses stanza breaks. It makes me think of driving to hospital when I was in labour with my son, the gaps between contractions - the expectancy. There are different qualities of pause in poems. These ones are tense line breaks and tense stanza breaks. I like the way each stanza gets shorter by one line each time, the way the gaps between contractions get shorter too as the birth nears.

And then there’s that opening-out at the end which stops the poem from clicking shut: the child seems ‘new cast’, but who has been made anew here? We are left with an implied, a question that never goes away in parenting - who crafts who? Where does the process of making stop?

You can read more work by Karan here.