Here is my book review of Merril D. Smith‘s beautiful new poetry collection. I hope it makes you want to order a copy!

Merril D. Smith’s new poetry collection, Held Inside the Folds of Time, is a testament to Smith’s background as a historian. But what is more important is Smith’s sensitivity to previous generations. She opens the collection with a poem about a cave painting. By doing so, he connects us with all who have come before.

She recognizes what she’s learned from her ancestors, who–in “How I Learned”–“showed me that I have my own wings– / unfold them, fly. This, too, is part of the pattern.” The poet can’t or won’t get away from them: “My dead follow me through every timeline” (“Suspended, Surrounded”).

Smith’s ancestors who immigrated to the United States, her own family of origin, even the soldiers who died in a Revolutionary War battle are all subjects of the book. “In Memorium: For the Unknown Soldiers at Red Bank Battlefield” asserts “their ghosts roam the battlefield / settling their bones, unsettled in time.”

Nature features prominently in Smith’s poetry, and this is where the lyrical beauty of her writing is best displayed. She uses many poetic techniques, particularly variations of rhyme, such as off rhyme, end rhyme, and internal rhyme. These lines are from “Cross-Quarter Days”:

The blooms have browned,

blossoms scattered to the wind

now snow veils the ground,

there above, one bony root unpinned.”

While the poems contain examples of the beauty of life, the overall tone of the book is a lovely mournfulness. As Smith writes in “Winter Birches,” “there is no happily ever, only after.”

Held Inside the Folds of Time demonstrates the potential gorgeousness of language as it mourns and celebrates the poet’s world.