by Jared Smith

600 Pages, 6 x 9

Library of Congress Control Number:  2012930700

ISBN:  978-1-935520-70-2

Cover Art:  Cover Photo
by Deborah Parriott Smith

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The Collected Poems of Jared Smith: 1971 - 2011 brings together almost 300 poems from 9 books along with over 60 poems that were previously uncollected. After earning degrees in poetry and literature from NYU, Jared spent 30 years in technology research and education, including appointments as a Special Appointee and Advisor to Argonne National Laboratory, and technical and policy advisor to several White House Commissions during the Clinton Administration. Actively involved in poetry for more than 40 years, Jared has served as an Editor, Board Member, and Advisory Board Member of The New York Quarterly; as a Contributing Editor for Home Planet News; as Poetry Editor of Trail & Timberline; and several-time Guest Editor of The Pedestal Magazine; as well as past President of Poets & Patrons in Chicago; and host of three reading venues during the 1980s in New York’s Greenwich Village; among other ventures in the arts. Jared now lives with his wife in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, not far from Boulder, Colorado.

Recommendations

...organic poetry of a very high order indeed, and it should please those purists among us who must insist on some totally new form that can embody all the complexity of psychological growth and reality flux and mercurial change that is all around us always, and yet still speak to us clearly in the here and now.

—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

...how joyous it feels to be reminded that every inch of earth we walk is a sacred bone-heap, and this is now true of our highways and dams and bridges. His elegy grows stronger, more urgent....I'd call him a prophet of doom if it were not for the love that simply aches in every line.

—Diana Hume George

He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facets of or 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. Williams, 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...while Whitman's long lines are incantatory and Williams' are loquacious...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

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...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

I like your I-witness of the song in our blood…it’s a pleasure!

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti