Venetian Blue (Paperback)

Alex Smith's fine-boned and energetic poems arise from a tension between the natural and the made. Sometimes the starting-point of a poem will be a landscape; at other times a work of art, an historical event; each is treated with the same acuteness - of ear and eye alike. Though unadvertised, there is in every piece a confidence in poetry itself and in the world re-formed by poetry. The personality of the author, though present, is implied, rather than being made the object of attention.