These are poems that sweat in the workplace along with men and women who drive our economy...from factory floors, to science labs, to high-rise offices. They are poems of strife, and love, and hope born within the heart of the common man. And nothing is greater than the common man.
Excerpt
In the plate glass window factory they
watch reflections of sky
and melt down silicon mountains before
coffee break.
The sun rises and sets in iron vats.
It is contained.
In the plate glass window factory they
build liquid frames
for pictures of farm houses where the
farmer rises early in the morning
or for train cars that ensnare the
mountains of a continent...
And in the plate glass window factory,
the workers never go home,
not even when they fish dark rivers
beneath the stars.
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A master blender, September 20, 2001
Reviewer: richard downing (see more about me) from hudson, Florida USA
Isn't science a world removed from the world of poetry? Of course not, and certainly not in Smith's collection. In fact, science often becomes the poem, or is it the other way around? - and that's the point. Smith brings together the two worlds to create a third world - the world that is this volume. I usually read through a new volume of poetry quickly the first time. But I moved slowly through Walking the Perimeters, delighting in a poetic voice that is unique, stopping to reread an image over twice or more before moving on.
Questions, unquestioned discoveries, and answers in parable and rhyme…. This collection records a journey starting with a 1960s retrospective and the first man on the moon, moving to a new millennium welcomed in with a terrorist spin, family crises,
