AustLit

'This collection of thirty-eight poems is a book in three parts: Elsewhere; Everything is Evening; and Final Days. These are poems of an unrehearsed life, of paths taken and not taken, of lives not lived left behind, and the shadows they leave. Mostly, these poems were birthed by narrative, and deepened by the lyric, which, following Judith Beveridge in her essay ‘Lyric Poetry’, “seeks to communicate an experience to others” through “the wild and lovely agency of poems.” Smith’s hope is that these poems invite the reader in, and take them somewhere else, that they seek beyond what we see before us, toward what lies beneath. His hope, too, in Beveridge’s words, is for a “resonance and attunement” between reader and listener.' (Publication summary)