Here They Are by Michael Schmidt
Smith|Doorstop (The Poetry Business)
Poetry sometimes goes its own way, abandoning storytelling and lyric and following instead “the way of language”, discovering for a change what it has to say — more interesting than what the “I” intended.
Fossils and ghosts live in language, etymologies and echoes. An eco-system in itself. You live there in a world rich in creatures, some of them human, that talk in their own ways under the shade of trees.
Michael Schmidt’s remarkable new collection is his shortest and most brilliantly complete and compelling. It bears out Rachel Mann’s comment in a review about the ‘precise and disconcerting magic’ of his language, and reminds us that here is one of our finest poets. More than ever in this pamphlet we see as John Ashbery did a ‘vibrant, radiant and passionate discourse, that is at once earthy and numinous.’
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