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An Exploration of Nature in "In the Silence of the Migrated Birds"
By Laura Peters
Library Communications
Posted 9/22/2008
MADISON, Wis. –Austin Smith combines his intimate connections with nature and life experiences in a recent poetry chapbook In the Silence of the 
Migrated Birds, published by the University of Wisconsin Libraries’ Parallel Press.
Austin Smith speaks as a poet-philosopher of the rural Midwest. Growing up on a farm Smith’s love for the earth and nature has been with him since birth. His father, a farmer and also a poet, inspired Austin to write his own poetry. In a voice both contemplative and elegant, he explores a geology of layered meanings beneath an owl’s cry, an old silo, stone walls and birches. Smith writes, “I rarely dream of the ocean these days,/but when I drink water I find myself/staring down into the glass,/wondering where the molecules have been,/what seas they’ve been a part of,/what poets have breathed them in.”
A recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Smith is the recipient of the Artist’s Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His inspirations have come from traveling experiences to India and Nepal, the mountains of Alaska, the oceans of California, and Arizona desert; each journey has inspired him to write more. His great longing is still to spend his life farming and writing in the quiet neighborhood of southwestern Wisconsin.
The Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. For more information, visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection from “Sleeping in My Boyhood Bedroom Again”:
I know this room the way
a river knows its bed:
every crack of plaster
through three skins of paint,
every fissure veining the ceiling
where the old house has buckled
bearing the weight of five lives of sleep.
On the doorframe of the closet
our father measured our growth,
penciling a line above our heads,
recording the year and the weather
as if recording water levels.