A Plausible Light: New and Collected Poems

Poetry. The poems of Paul Smyth have appeared in magazines and journals including The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry (which awarded him the Dillon Memorial Prize). His first collection, Conversions, published in 1974 by the University of Georgia Press, was followed by two books of poems illustrated by artist Barry Moser and a collection of epigrams. Paul Smyth died in late 2006, just after completing last corrections on the manuscript for A PLAUSIBLE LIGHT."A PLAUSIBLE LIGHT is the last book of a strong and distinguished talent. Paul Smyth had an easy mastery of verse forms, a vivid narrative gift, a good acquaintance with fact and natural process, and a rare capacity for confronting what is painful in life. He had, for instance, a Frostian power to acknowledge fear—an emotion which he finds even in the sound of a hummingbird's wings. Whatever is strikingly said is to some extent disarmed, and for all its darkness Smyth's poetry has high morale. Of the many poems one might single out, it is "Erik Satie: 'Trois Gymnopedies'" which seems to me the gem of this selection; as an evocation both of music and of sad experience, it is a triumph of articulateness."—Richard Wilbur