Sucking-Stones

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

John Smith’s first major collection is made up of two small books published in Prince Edward Island in the 1970s, as well as additional, more current poems, some of which appeared in the anthology, Poets of Prince Edward Island, published in 1980 by the Ragweed Press. Smith is an associate professor of English at the University of P.E.I. A more delightfully witty, urbane, and well-written book of poems would be difficult to find: trust Quadrant Editions once again to publish high quality poetry by relative unknowns in well-designed and well-made books. Sucking-Stones contains poetry that is characterized by brittle, incisive images (“his eyes red lozenges of pain”; “float in this capsule of shade”), an adroit sense of diction, and an omnipresent playfulness verging on irony and sarcasm, occasionally bursting into lampoon-type humour and even dumb jokes (e.g., “A Newfoundlander went parking with his girl”). Throughout, Smith manages to infuse every poem with a kinetic sense of awareness, much as Frank O’Hara did in his poems. These are poems of a very refined sensibility and there isn’t one bad poem in the whole book. Some of the poems, such as “Sandra 8 P.M.,” “May I Have the Pleasure of?,” and “Up from Summer,” are simply wonderful. Sucking-Stones is a breath of fresh air in Canadian poetry, written by a poet who found his voice before casting a book out into the world.