'Municipal Love Poems' is Simon Smith's third collection from
Shearsman Books, and is a companion volume to 'Last Morning'
(Parlor Press) which appeared in early 2022. "Simon Smith's
Municipal Love Poems navigates between the intimately personal, and
the impersonally public. Everywhere the expression is musical,
presented in tight lines, phrases, couplets and tercets — never
longer — although several of these poems sustain their intensity
over pages. The form is 'micrometer right / to the exact fit'.
Smith's question in these poems centres around song - sound, music,
voice, tongue — 'how do you make the ordinary language sing?'.
The poems are characterised by word play and slippage, where one
word suggests the next, where the link is as much anagrammatic as
it is imagistic. For Smith the lyric may be 'lyre', but it is also
'liar'. These poems move from the celebratory to the more complex
elegiac realm of hauntology. Often the subject matter is
'municipal', and these poems are as likely to name BBC News 24,
email, 3G, Apple, Monsanto, Isis, space junk and algorithms, as
they are likely to include the pastoral indicators of herons,
nightingales and blackbirds, bluebells, clouds, rain and moonlight.
This is a dynamic, exciting, and attuned collection of poetry."
—Andy Brown "In these poems, even as they deny the transcendence
of love, hope lies in the small details of everyday life. The
isolated lines and short stanzas of a voice with a catch in the
throat produce poems and songs where love lies somewhere between a
Hallmark card and Baudelaire. Poetry may be the result of
inspiration, of taking things in, but, as Simon Smith tells us we
also sing when we breathe out into the world." —Ian Davidson
General
Imprint: |
Shearsman Books
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
November 2022 |
Authors: |
Simon Smith
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 8mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
126 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-84861-822-0 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-84861-822-0 |
Barcode: |
9781848618220 |
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