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Simon Smith Reverdy Road |
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Biographical note: Simon Smith, born 1961 in Redruth, Cornwall, brought up on the borders of Hertfordshire and Essex. Educated at the University of Kent at Canterbury, he lived in Pennsylvania from 1984–1986 where he threw in an academic career for one in librarianship. He has worked at the Poetry Library in London since 1991, and became Librarian in 2003. He edited GRIllE (1991–1993) and was poetry editor of Angel Exhaust (1998–1999). He is one of the judges for the National Poetry Competition 2004 along with Elaine Feinstein, Ciaran Carson and chair Denis MacShane, the Minister for Europe.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844710270
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PAPERBACK
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Short
description/annotation: This book works along a gauge, a valency, between language as communication of information, to language as matter, as a thing. The book focusses on the processes of language – sound, rhythm, shape and design. Meaning has receded behind the material and play of language.
Main description: Reverdy Road is a book of poems celebrating the aleatory. They are various responses to their now. Each poem is an open gift, a happy thing in the world – there’s plenty of time to be depressed later on. The book is in three parts divided by treatment rather than matter. But it is the matter of words that is the very subject, and how they signify that matters most. There is no discernable progress, more a marking of time, place, gesture, answering questions through their own musculature. They have embarked on no journey, but they seem to be heading to another destination from a location we can’t know. We are getting there, however. Like Orpheus there is no looking back. Making the world a better place is their business and purpose, they are friendly and want to talk to you. They won’t hurt. They ask very different questions from journalists, but they love journalists. The body’s place is the question they ask and answer they are giving – how do bodies move and remove themselves. The engine is a black Moleskine notebook. Where they enter life. As Smith says, “All my life they lived under my skin, now they enter your circulation.”
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Excerpt from book: The Magician, Jack Spicer
Review quote: Listen up to Simon Smith’s London phonemes in a lyric serial that commutes gods, toast, half light, loss, concrete, poetry, phones and angels from poem to poem. What will happen next memory asks. A sharp poetic intelligence answers, at work and love in the spliced expression, quick emotion, tried and untested reasons. Peter Middleton
Unpublished endorsement : I think the book is sensational, therefore: ‘More than any poet of his generation, Smith knows it is better to be a freak performer at a penny gaff than a labourer seeking work. Yet he is no side-show Bob or door-to-door huckster peddling quack cure-alls. Devoid of nostrums, his poetry is that rare thing: a real-deal panacea.’ Anthony Mellors
Unpublished endorsement : I can see where Smith has picked up on [Tom] Raworth’s speed and got it into his own nerves brilliantly. I really like the way his poems come at one sideways on, using the fast visual bits that are how we perceive the world. Jeremy Reed
Review quote: There is the charming optimism of “you do amazing things simply by reading”, as well as the extreme lyricism of “Tears of rain wind round eaves tears of rain wind round eaves / Tears of rain wind round eaves tears of rain wind round eaves”. The latter is an instructive example of Smith’s approach. We pronounce “tears” confidently enough, but “wind” is more treacherous – should it be read as verb instead of noun? Such enactments of indecision – the nervousness I mentioned – lend grit to the moments of cheery optimism. Simon Coppock
Review quote: "You can't paraphrase the Real any more," Simon Smith once wrote, but his poems do funny things with the quotidian. Dry, dexterous in their crosscutting of linguistic registers, they maintain an enviable sense of directness that sometimes arrives at the epigrammatic. Kultureflash
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