Enchantment and Other Demons

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

The four sections of this volume are remarkably different from each
other. “Things As They Are” is a sequence of 27 short poems;
“Seasonal” is a suite of unrhyming, dated sonnets about and named
for the poet’s children; “Enchantment and Other Demons” is a group
of five fablelike prose-poems; and “Arabesque” is a long prose-poem
in brief sections, and organized by a chess game. As distinct as the
forms are, and as dreamlike as the metamorphoses of the poet’s persona
are, still the collection retains a definite unity; the poetic
perception and articulation throughout are calmly keen and wise.
Smith’s poems offer many varied pleasures.

Without grasping—either the reader or the topic—some of the poems
erupt with a sensation of holiness, if one can use that word without its
connotations of righteousness and didacticism. This brief example is
from (and about) “Tall Trees”: “Spreading their roots /over the
earth’s surface, / they hold the soul of the world / in their
embrace.” Even when it is a poem’s playfulness and humor that at
first nudge the reader, these effects become effortlessly suggestive in
Smith’s hands. He quotes his children’s questions and observations;
Nicole, for instance, at her fifth birthday party, asks, “When I grow
up, do you grow down?”, and observes of roses, “I love them, I can
smell them with my heart.”

From his writing place on Vancouver Island, Smith ventures beyond
boundaries and categories of all sorts. “To live out of time, beyond
the brief darkness of dreams,” the poet says, “ is to court
demons.” Enchantment and Other Demons is, simply, a marvelous book.