Poetry
Hip Pocket Press
CAFÉ DISSERTATION
This poetry collection of love and wonder makes clear that what lies in the grave truth of love is an inherent loss. Yes, the poet says, there is pain here, but it is akin to, say, what is felt when a thorn is plucked quickly from the flesh and followed, then, by the warm flush of sudden clarity, a keener knowledge—the astonishment at being fully alive. It is the passing of all things which gives them their preciousness. Yes, this is a fallen world replete with the sting of death, but it is redeemed each time that sensing the cost, we choose to love anyway, embracing its necessity. Whether it is in stopping to notice the widower, the anorexic, the disabled child, or cattle to slaughter, spare buttes and dry fields, landscape specific to the harsh beauty of the interior of California, we too stop as if at stations of the cross, infused with a kind of religious Yes to our allotments of sorrow as they prompt us again and again to go on living fully—loving. This is no work of theology; these poems bypass the mind to warm the heart directly. Remarkable and certain is the achievement of these vital, elegant epiphanies.
S.F. Austin State Univ.
SOUNDS THE LIVING MAKE
“D. James Smith’s poems derive or rather arrive, from the physical world—breaths and glimmers that we will recognize, but with images and language that will transport the reader elsewhere. These poems are intensely felt and beautifully written with surprising layers of complexity that are incantatory and in touch with the sacred.” –Gary Short (10 Moons and 13 Horses.)
Ahsahta Press, Boise State Univ.
PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD VENTRILOQUIST
“It is said that, because there was no moon, Van Gogh painted ‘Starry Night’ with candles stuck in his hat band. This book has that feel, that kind of blurred swirl, a hard-won beauty that emerges from a patient struggle with the dark, so that we are as surprised as the poet at how ‘love can come/To live inside you/Long after you stopped/Wanting it,’ at how ‘You could look back/and call it luck’.” –Dorianne Laux (Life on Earth.)