Prayers for the Dead and Other Poems

This is Michael Smith's first collection since his Collected Poems of 2009 and is an elegiac volume. As the author says: Let me try to define prayer as I am using it here. It is a voice in the head ours and not ours. It speaks in words we scarcely understand. Unstoppable unless distracted by our quotidian pursuits. Beckett said it thus: 'All poetry as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody is prayer.' Enigmatic but what else would one expect from Beckett? Essentially I perceive prayer as a form of homage or 'recognition'-the other word used by Beckett.