Transient Light

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

Transience—light shining on a cityscape, on a building, on a street,
lingering for a moment and then passing by, passing through time,
leaving a faint imprint in someone’s mind: Toronto, Paris, 1896, 1925,
1988; images frozen in time and place. These are the transient lights
Smith has captured in his new collection of poems, bridging decades and
continents with the sensitivity of a poet looking at one thing at a
time, yet seeing all as if it were one—Paris a lifetime ago, and Paris
now; Toronto over the span of a century, and Toronto now, juxtaposed by
matching titles, differentiated by sections and dates. What emerges is a
gradually developing image of the poet as a careful—and
caring—observer, a photographer of words and a historian, meticulous
in his attention to detail, trying to capture that which does not remain
and capturing what was not meant to stay: the passing light illuminating
a scene, falling on a face, bringing a detail into focus, and passing
on. Images reverberate across the division of the book, across the
distance and across time, as in “The Tree. 1963,” where “in a slim
city grove / the tremble of trees falling / still echoes.” So in the
pages of Transient Light, the afterglow of places, the haloes of people
and events also echo still, waiting for a compassionate ear to linger,
to listen to the passages of time, to hear the light brushing across the
mindscapes generated by the realities that once were for a brief moment
in time. A diary in many ways, as well as an album and a historical
record, this volume rewards the reader with the richness of its images,
images that are bound to linger long after the light has moved on once
again.