Critical Commentary
What Others Have Written Of Jared Smith's Work
"I like your I-witness of the Song in our blood...it's a pleasure."
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"...utterly original and as solid an any poetry that's being written today. It has a firm grasp of form, it has its own unique music in line after line of low-key symbolist imagery, and it is also austerely disrespectful of all the right things. I like this poetry a lot."
--William Packard
"There is a kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith's best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda."
--Joseph Bruchac
"Again and again, Jared Smith takes us into a world that we feel is strange and impossible, only to make us see, suddenly, that this IS our life, our condition, and until now we have been shying away from reality. Years ago, on my author-interview show on NPR, I hailed Jared as 'the most important new voice in American poetry since Walt Whitman.'"
--Walter James Miller
"He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facets of our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose. Esthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K. Williams and compare his work favorably."
--Harry Smith
"There is a lovely muscularity pervading Jared Smith's work that's reminiscent of the more obvious long-lined poets' efforts, Whitman's and C.K. William's, for example. But Smith's poetry is unique in that he seems unlike these other two writers, not to think in terms of an "overflowing line" but to peer, consistently, beyond it. What this means is that while Whitman's long lines are incantatory and Williams' are loquacious in a relaxed, double-hexameter sort of way, Smith's work, much like an Action Painter's, serves the ambition of the gesture and thus, of necessity, stretches beyond the canvas."
--Terri Brown-Davidson
"For Smith, there is a kind of pathos in human attempts to replicate the unfathomable beauty of a mountain or a star-filled sky, a pathos, which is worthy of regret, even mocking, but never rage, scorn, or absolute despair. Though his tone could not be called gentle, it is sympathetic to the human condition and the futility, frustration, sorrow, and bewilderment that accompany it. This sympathy elevates his poetry to the levels of the masters who have influenced him"
--Joselle Vanderhooft
"Jared Smith's work deals with the Here and Now, yes, but is so involved with All-Time/All-Culture that, if you don't keep totally focused, at times you're liable to step over the connections. Smith is a kind of Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal-Indus Valley-Mesopotamian-Tiawanaku Combo-Man watching the late news, buzzarding over the contemporary world and seeing its miserable negativity…but ultimately always referring back to the basic sanity of the universe around us. Sane Nature versus Idiot Man. There is a tremendous Keatsian-Whitmanesque visionary sweep here, moving over the earth's surface, always concentrating on light, the Here and Now, but always in cosmic context. Smith's work, carefully read and meditated on, is a course in cosmic-personal sanity."
--Hugh Fox
"Jared Smith's voice and hypnotic technique create a vivid world in which images and ideas appear as easily as in a dream. His poems have a sense of urgency and purpose. We face the modern world, from nanotechnology to the darkness between trees, with an intelligent, observant and visionary guide. He seems to name every nameable thing with an unnamable energy that helps define who we are in our world. This is what poetry is about! His poems are imaginative, passionate, personal and expansive."
--Michael Spring
"Jared Smith is an excellent poet; who has learned to live and believe with conviction that the entire world belongs in and of poetry, not just pieces and bits like nature poetry, dramatic stories or the demands of friendship and love."
--Andrew Glaze
