Last Morning By Smith, Simon Simon Smith,

Simon Smith

Its not only that Simon Smith captures like no one else the new rhythms of attention and distraction that have emerged over the last decade. In Last Morning he writes a poetry of pace that seems to walk down the page, often in little threeline clusters, creating meandering journeys that casually scramble the internal and external surfaces they negotiate. At once transcendental and grounded, these poems are intensely of their place and moment. Smiths audible dialogue with American poets like OHara, Spicer, and Peter Gizzi does nothing to stop him from being an ambassador of how Britain feels today to the hypothetical North American reader. These poems will walk with you. Daniel KatzReading Simons Smiths nimble poems is not so different than riding a roller coaster built inside a pinball machine, where "space is a cube not a square." Everything you bump up against is real, as the poems pivot from one sight (and site) to another "tent on the edge of town." The reader is always being pulled along by "song after song" full of "vital signs" from the "return of the World" to "scent is presence/welcomed to night." Smith refolds the border between out there and in here in different and surprising ways. In Last Morning, he is open and alert to the "suns hum," while knowing "the mirror swallows this side of the World." And the "song [gets] made up as it goes along." John YauIn these new poems, Simon Smith operates as a kind of lyric focus puller on the world, bringing not just image... | Simon Smith Last Morning Paperback Book