Far from dark poems, these poems annotate the self-referential nature of resilient creative process in this poetry, much of which is based in the visual context never seen by the reader. The tentative and impermanent, yes, lose strength in the persistent face of tragedy and its overcoming. Bridging narrative fiction and a year of ekphrastic poetry, Smith chronicles in poetry an absent brother afflicted with PTSD after Vietnam, his sister (an artist) who brings to the canvas trauma of her own, an unstable mother who succumbs to complicated bereavement, and a father who hangs himself – over the drowning of the youngest sibling one winter. A primer on grief and loss.
Daniel L. Smith, poet 