Biking Through the Stone Age

Virginia Smith travels through rich psychic, spiritual, and cultural terrain in poignant, often slyly humorous poems. Poems with a knife-keen awareness of the fraught balance between love and disgust, sanity and madness, the natural world and the world we have made. Biking with her granddaughters, she remembers her own girlhood, when "kids chased the DDT truck. . . /mouths open to swallow its secret-." Meanwhile, the girls pedal "into/their future-the Plastiocene Age/ their beloved polar bears/drifting toward extinction/floods rushing past the fires." In other poems, failure-to-thrive orchids parallel a husband's delicate return to mental health; an elderly aunt corrects the family narrative: Aunt Jan died of a botched abortion, not leukemia. There is Smith's witty, weary witness to the onslaught of charity solicitations in a brilliant one-sentence-sans-comma deluge of pleas, promises, and threats that we all will recognize. And lyricism throughout, as when the poet watches the night sky, "the great ladle pouring light/and heat on our gazing."

Mary Rohrer-Dann, Taking the Long Way Home.

Virginia Smith's poems embrace the magic of everyday life, detailing places both familiar and longed-for, where the common thread is the poet's ability to transform the experience of a woman who is daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend into sharp, evocative image. Whether it's "dust and dead insects flying...like dark fairies" from the ceiling fan to the kitchen counter or "Canada geese weaving/their southward skein" across a canvas of sky, Smith invites readers to explore the interlocking patterns that give wings to an earthbound existence.

Charlotte Holmes, The Grass Labyrinth

In these poems, description reveals the poet's consciousness dazzling across the detailed surfaces of her ordinary days, noticing, for instance, "the door's mail mouth clapping shut /demanding the usual ransom." Scenes from childhood, glimpses of maternity and mothering, bittersweet love of aging parents, romance and the joy of grandchildren assemble a life in a voice equally determined to name the pains and praise the pleasures. And sometimes, her words burst into images as sharp and sparkling as "champagne stars."

Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields