Edited by Barry Schwabsky
Published 2016. Paperback, 9 x 6ins,
ISBN 9781848615106. [Download a sample PDF from this volume here.]

In a writing career that began in the early 1980s, Simon Smith has published a dozen pamphlets and collections of poetry, reviewed and written essays for Poetry Review, PN Review, fragmente, Stand and Blackbox Manifold among other periodicals, and translated the work of Catullus, Martial and Reverdy. This selection of his work covers the period 1989-2012, and is edited by the poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky. There are generous selections from Fifteen Exits, Reverdy Road, Mercury and London Bridge , alongside unavailable early work, and previously unpublished poetry from the sequences, More Ammo and Content. On first receiving Reverdy Road Schwabsky recalls: ‘It was a revelation: resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School’s love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith’s British contemporaries’.

‘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. A rare pleasure found so succinctly in the telling.’ – Bill Berkson

'Simon Smith’s writing forges English language poetry out of the translated utterance, London Bridge, [fixes] itself not to place but to the questions of crossing.' – David Herd, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

'Reverdy Road and Mercury are book-length sequences of short, epigrammatic lyrics which pick up and redistribute the language and life-world of modern London with a Raworthian lightness.' – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry

‘This is not the lyric subjectivity of the English Romantics but the bric-a-brac of international collision' — Lytton Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books

‘The Jack Lemmon of English poetry.’ – Geraldine Monk

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