Published 2022. Paperback, 126pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618220 [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]

Municipal Love Poems comprises two sequences, ‘General Purpose Love Poems’ and ‘Song Book: Series of Songs’. The former is a sequence of long essay-like poems and the latter, shorter song-like poems, which form new spaces, public and private, as call and response, as broken and lyric spaces to think in and with.

This book was written in the years 2015-2017, after the Paris attacks, the migration crisis, the Brexit vote, the election of Trump and installation of May, the war in Syria. One question might be: how did these events change what is meant by public and private space? How can poetry act as antidote to the hostile environments we experience every day. Perhaps some things as ‘useless’ as the song and melody of poetry could open places from where answers might start to be sounded as echoes, and where they might start to appear as ghosts.

Municipal Love Poems is the companion volume to Last Morning , published in early 2022 by Parlor Press (USA).

‘Simon Smith’s Municipal Love Poems navigates between the intimately personal, and the impersonally public. Everywhere the expression is musical, presented in tight lines, phrases, couplets and tercets – never longer – although several of these poems sustain their intensity over pages. The form is ‘micrometer right / to the exact fit’. Smith’s question in these poems centres around song – sound, music, voice, tongue – ‘how do you make the ordinary language sing?’. The poems are characterised by word play and slippage, where one word suggests the next, where the link is as much anagrammatic as it is imagistic. For Smith the lyric may be ‘lyre’, but it is also ‘liar’. These poems move from the celebratory to the more complex elegiac realm of hauntology. Often the subject matter is ‘municipal’, and these poems are as likely to name BBC News 24, email, 3G, Apple, Monsanto, Isis, space junk and algorithms, as they are likely to include the pastoral indicators of herons, nightingales and blackbirds, bluebells, clouds, rain and moonlight. This is a dynamic, exciting, and attuned collection of poetry.’ —Andy Brown

“In these poems, even as they deny the transcendence of love, hope lies in the small details of everyday life. The isolated lines and short stanzas of a voice with a catch in the throat produce poems and songs where love lies somewhere between a Hallmark card and Baudelaire. Poetry may be the result of inspiration, of taking things in, but, as Simon Smith tells us we also sing when we breathe out into the world.” —Ian Davidson

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