"Indeed, Smith is one of those rare poets, like Hardy, who can break your heart in all the ways you didn’t know you wanted it to be broken. Poem after poem says the things that we would say if we were more honest, and says those honest things the way we would say them if we were more artful. But, unlike Hardy, who could rely on a chilly pastoral mode to dramatize his characters’ inner suffering, Smith, being a poet of our own age, cannot turn to brumal heaths and beautifully drear landscapes but must, instead, show the heartbroken and lost of our own time as they are, wandering through city streets and suburban bars, lacking even the dignity of suffering picturesquely."
Truer words. . . Smith seems to constantly deliver.
Last edited by Ed Shacklee; 08-12-2013 at 08:09 PM.
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New Review of Matthew Buckley Smith's book
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