Municipal Love Poems

<p class=ql-align-justify><em>Municipal Love Poems</em> is a companion volume to <em>Last Morning</em> (Parlor Press) which appeared in early 2022 and is Simon Smith's third collection from Shearsman Books. </p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Simon Smith's <em>Municipal Love Poems</em> 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</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>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</p><p><br></p>