A Plausible Light: New and Collected Poems - Hardcover

Smyth, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0976298317 ISBN 13: 9780976298311

Publisher: El Leon Literary Arts, 2008

Synopsis

Poetry. The poems of Paul Smyth have appeared in magazines and journals including The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry (which awarded him the Dillon Memorial Prize). His first collection, Conversions, published in 1974 by the University of Georgia Press, was followed by two books of poems illustrated by artist Barry Moser and a collection of epigrams. Paul Smyth died in late 2006, just after completing last corrections on the manuscript for A PLAUSIBLE LIGHT.

"A PLAUSIBLE LIGHT is the last book of a strong and distinguished talent. Paul Smyth had an easy mastery of verse forms, a vivid narrative gift, a good acquaintance with fact and natural process, and a rare capacity for confronting what is painful in life. He had, for instance, a Frostian power to acknowledge fear—an emotion which he finds even in the sound of a hummingbird's wings. Whatever is strikingly said is to some extent disarmed, and for all its darkness Smyth's poetry has high morale. Of the many poems one might single out, it is "Erik Satie: 'Trois Gymnopedies'" which seems to me the gem of this selection; as an evocation both of music and of sad experience, it is a triumph of articulateness."—Richard Wilbur

About this title

About the Author

Paul Smyth (31 January 1944 - 17 December 2006) was an American poet, writer, and teacher. Paul Smyth was born in Boston and raised in Holliston, Massachusetts. At the age of sixteen, he left home to hitchhike across the North America. During this time, he spent time in Mexico, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Provincetown. It was in Massachusetts that he got his first writing job as a freelancer for the New Beacon Newspaper. He studied in Harvard University's extension program with poet Theodore Morrison. He received his B.A. in 1968. Smyth was married three times, the third time to the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. He had two children from his second marriage.

Reviews

Although far from prolific—this seems to be only his second sizable collection—Smyth (1944–2006) was a craftsmanly writer of formal verse who excelled in the sonnet. He used form to contain the impersonal randomness of life and constrain fear, the latter with aching pathos when he makes “A Hummingbird” an embodiment of fear, its whir the quintessence of threat. Aspects of his life that the poems address, including childhood physical abuse, a broken marriage, and alienated fatherhood, attest reasons enough for fear and distrust of human interaction, and he is seldom more powerful than when limning his personal misery, as in “Of His Affliction,” touching the abuse, and “Of Scholarship, Divorce, and Lunch,” a masterly expression of the desperation of rationed modern fatherhood. There is parlous little humor in his work, let alone relief, though gardening and rather humble artwork, such as the blown-glass orchid in “A Gift,” can assuage and console. That such bleak stuff is so compelling and often beautiful is a conundrum of art. And Smyth was an artist. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: El Leon Literary Arts
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0976298317
• ISBN 13: 9780976298311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 141