Day In, Day Out

Simon Smith’s series of poetry journals is a plate of spinning, stunning experience. With his renowned poetic skill, Smith quietly and carefully shifts from the panoramic into the still frame of the inner life with its familiar daily worries. . . . Day In, Day Out is washed in the meals of new potatoes, sautèd cabbage leaves, the wine of Château Moulin de Honternieux Médoc (2012), Dogfish Head IPA, pizza, salad with sparkling wine. It’s a delicious journey. —Elaine Randell

There’s a history of English language poets transplanted to places ostensibly sharing the same tongue (Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams, Kenneth Rexroth in the UK; Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn in the USA). For these writers, the ordinary becomes the exotic. Their responses might be like those of a Martial transported from Spain to the Roman capital, with an outsider’s ability to detect the fine (or gross) echoes of Empire amid the detritus. Simon Smith joins these ranks – He is a Paul Blackburn for the information age. —Laurie Duggan

Simon Smith’s work continues to be an essential reminder of the possibilities of poetry in the present moment. Day In, Day Out serves up quickly paced journal poems bursting with the details of the everyday life of travel, transience, and self-imposed displacement. Ghosted by his recently deceased father and Paul Blackburn’s own journal poetry, Smith generously tells “everything I know” about time, impermanence, and the ordinary scintilla of the moment grasped as at once fleeting and overwhelmingly real. The devil—and the divine—is in the details.  —Stephen Collis

SIMON SMITH has published five collections of poetry. His third collection, Mercury (Salt Publications), was long-listed for the Costa Prize in 2007. A selected poems, More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2016, and his latest pamphlet is Salon Noir (Equipage, 2016). He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.