Waking before Dawn - Softcover

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At first, Smith comes off a tad too sweet, as such titles as "Trust," "Your Inner Face," "Day of Rest," and "A Wedding Poem" suggest. But he's no latter-day Edgar Guest. His poems look formally stanzaic but rhyme only by happenstance and observe no metrical pattern, though any one poem's lines are usually all three, four, or five beats long. Call them free verse trying to be as easy on the eye as Smith's unpretentious, ordinary speech is on the ear (he's the peer of his plain-speaking acknowledged master, Robert Bly, for sure). While he leads with his sunniest stuff, succeeding sections of elegies and laments for the state of politics and society darken the mood. In the concluding section, optimism is achieved again, though out of the assurance that winter, the storm, grief, anger, lies, and time all pass. So wake up and dream of "the world trying to be born." Smith is a serious optimist, who ultimately recalls Julian of Norwich: "And all manner of things shall be well." Ray Olson
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