“Disasters uproot us, carry us along / with their flow, lock us into each other,” writes Thomas R. Smith in the title poem of this abundant collection. Time and change are persistent themes throughout, whether of youthful desire or “the bright salt of time” that stings, yet quickens us as we age. A central sequence, “Impressionist Calendar,” revives the calendrical poem loved by the English Romantics, and topical poems note events as recent as the murder of George Floyd and the COVID-l9 pandemic. Over the arc of this book, Smith recognizes us all as truly “storm-borne” together on the “island” shaped by the disasters and opportunities of our time.

It’s a gift to know someone living just across the river, who has a heart so full it needs to sing.  Someone who is a witness to our stumbling and soaring, in times of darkness and light.  Thomas R. Smith speaks to us in a clear, brave voice in his new book Storm Island.  At the core of each of the poems is a “storm,” brought back to life.  He speaks so honestly about his experiences — early rites of passage, love, political awakenings, pain, pandemic, questions of the soul.  Yet the “island” is also a refuge, meditation on a healing world.  “Reserve for yourself / days of uninterrupted silence in which to hear / those things that have settled in your heart most deeply / sing their faithfulness beneath time’s altering sky.”  With compassion and gratitude for this life, Smith offers us his earned wisdom.  Heart big enough to hold us all. 

— Michael S. Moos, author of The Idea of the Garden

Thomas R. Smith’s new collection, Storm Island, is wide-ranging, wise and hopeful.  “Disasters uproot us, carry us along / with their flow, lock us into each other,” he says in the title poem, and this volume is about carrying on, being shaped by time and circumstance, and going with the flow.  Smith was at Woodstock, and what he says about being there applies to many watershed events, seen from the long perspective: “Now I think, what a crazy, lucky, / right thing it was for us to do.”  And it’s true:  there is always a bit of Woodstock in Thomas R. Smith; and over the years we’ve looked to him to remind us of that vision of bombers “turning into butterflies  / above our nation,” and he has kept the faith.  “The time to speak is always now,” he says in “Note to Self.” “Say your truth if only for those who may be / listening. . . . if not the childish public locked in their / death tango with destruction.”  Even in the last poem of the book, singing with a younger friend and a flame red cardinal, he doesn’t want to stop:  “the song must go on, virus or no / virus, we must find ways to keep ourselves singing together, even if only across the back fence.”  And we do, we will, thanks to Thomas R. Smith.

—Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate, author of Carrying Water to the Field:  New and Selected Poems