dear Hermes...

by Michelle Smith

By turns joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic, Michelle Smith’s debut collection of poems showcases a wide-ranging fascination with places, people, and story. Smith’s limpid and humane handling of an array of themes, emotions, and styles — her Norwegian ancestry, her Canadian Prairie heritage, the significance of family, the fragility of memory, world travel, ekphrasis, myth, and more — exemplifies the lyric self on a poetic grand tour, or pilgrimage, to meet the world. Framed by imaginative travelogues addressed to Greek gods, dear Hermes . . . offers readers an escape and an entrance — out of time and into the poet’s luminous experience. Readers who appreciate clear lyric and fleet voicing will relish Smith’s poetry.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2012

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of epistolary novels but hadn't realized that there was a whole genre of epistolary poetry as well! This collection has some wonderful examples of such poetry. I enjoyed this book and its combination of classicism, nature imagery and response to myth and to art. I also really liked the choice of form for most of these poems. As stated on the cover, this collection "exemplifies the lyric self on a poetic grand tour, or pilgrimage, to meet the world."

This was a collection in which I found poems to soothe my need for imagery and for twists of the language. I was interested in the stories it told and the echoes set going in my mind as I was reading, and I would recommend it to other poetry readers I know.

Full review at The Indextrious Reader