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Smith Recounts the 'Quiet, Graceful and Shy Events' of the Natural World in 'Kinnickinic'
Posted 11/17/2008
MADISON, Wis. – In the latest Parallel Press poetry chapbook Kinnickinnic, Thomas R. Smith “synchronizes his pulse with the ‘quiet, graceful, and shy
events’ of the natural world.” Smith traces the life cycle of a kinnickinnic, an Indian name for red osier dogwood, and the emergence of their “crimson shine” blossoms come spring. He compares the human transition from winter to spring with the rebirth of kinnickinnic buds, “Then I too stand up/out of the scabbed ice/of a dead season,/ready to flower and leaf/again from a bare/red stick.”
Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. His work was selected for The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner) and has reached large national audiences on Garrison Keillor’s public radio show, “Writer’s Almanac,” and in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry.” He is the author of five books of poems: Keeping the Star (New Rivers Press, 1988), Horse on Earth (Holy Cow! Press, 1994), The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), Winter Hours (Red Dragonfly Press, 2005), and Waking Before Dawn (Red Dragonfly Press, 2007). He has edited Walking Swiftly: Writings and Images on theOccasion of Robert Bly’s 65th Birthday (Ally Press, 1992; HarperCollins, 1993), and What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (Nineties Press, 1993), a selection of the Canadian poet Alden Nowlan. He is currently a Master Track poetry instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. For more information, please 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 his chapbook, Kinnickinnic:
To Summer
I sleepwalk through your heated noons and midnights.
You demand my complete allegiance,
so disloyally I slip away.
You birth a thousand fields of white clover,
to scathe them down in a single day.
To your intense spendthrift sun I bring
only a miser’s hoarded match-flame. You
lay your burning hands all over my body,
but I can only reach to touch your face.