Dear Hermes...

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. This Canadian Prairie poet's debut collection is framed by imaginative travelogues addressed to Greek gods. Front Flap: 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. Back Cover: dear Persephone, it wasn't the pomegranate, was it? c'mon, confess, 'cause the jig is up. it was words, words, words as delicious as those tart-sweet seeds, wasn't it? -from The traveller writes after a drink or two with Demeter Back Flap: Michelle Smith is a poet and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She has been writing and publishing poetry for over a decade. "I enjoyed this collection and its combination of classicism, nature imagery and response to myth and to art. I also really liked the choice of form.... 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." The Indextrious Reader, April 10, 2012 [Full post at http://indextrious.blogspot.ca/2012/04/dear-hermes.html] "This debut collection of poems addresses Smith's Norwegian ancestry, her prairie heritage, themes of family, memory, travel, myth, and more in ways that are joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic." Prairie Books NOW "The Greek myths that inform dear Hermes... function both as a device for crafting lyric apostrophes and as a model of travel that embraces the newness of otherwhere alongside the promise of imagination. Three pages of explanatory notes attest to the breath of cultural forms Smith engages in this slim volume.... dear Hermes... proves aptly attuned to the inner and outer workings of story." Travis V. Mason, Canadian Literature 218, Autumn 2013