Dear all,

Just to announce the publication of my fourth collection of poems.  The book is available through the usual channels: Waterstone's, Blackwell's and Amazon, or direct from Salt.  Launch and readings tba, probably in the autumn.

Here are the author pages on the Salt website and endorsements:

http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844714902.htm



'Robert Browning lived at the foot of Telegraph Hill and Chaucer’s pilgrims went along the Old Kent Road. This is a Londoner’s book, south of the river going east: brick built and bomb-damaged, with Roman remains, Oyster cards, Green Shield stamps, Keats, O’Hara, John James, Apollinaire, and everywhere unforeseen beauty and wit. I think ‘Honeymoon’ is my favourite, but sometimes I like ‘The Table’ best of all, what do you think?' -- Tony Lopez

‘Simon Smith has an instinct for unexpected forms which wring from his language memorable registers and tones. His imagination is musical, deliberate, generously impersonal. His translations attest to the deep connection and continuity of his work, underpinning its novelty with a classical authority wryly conceded.’ -- Michael Schmidt


'The occupants of Simon Smith’s poems are names for contemporary urban detail ratcheted up to experiential intensities that actually open (rather than shut down, as all too customary) the reader’s senses of place and person. The “mesh” is thereby not amiss, nor are these “Great buckets of Reality” hoisted to no purpose. A rare pleasure found so succinctly in the telling. As Smith’s refresher take on Martial has it, “Wouldn’t every man live, if he knew how,/Giving it all away to here and now?”'  'The book is really zigging' -- Bill Berkson

'The impression that this entire book of poems must have been very carefully planned out in advance is not entirely outweighed by the sense that he possibly just made it all up as he went along. Perhaps it doesn’t matter which is the case. If in this book Simon Smith really is just going on his nerve then, shucks, it is a pretty good nerve to be going on.'  -- Matthew Welton



Best,




Simon




Simon Smith
Lecturer in Creative Writing
School of English
Rutherford College
University of Kent
Canterbury
Kent
CT2 7NZ