Every Room described has its own 'Notes for reading.'
ROOMS is getting a publishing history along the lines of Leaves of Grass. This will be ROOMS 4th and updated edition. Who'd have thought a concept would carry this far and be so popular?
Excerpt
Room 1
All who come into this room
will be changed.
Nakedness
is not necessary. You
are vulnerable in other ways.
Your hands
are not
over your ears.
Your eyes
are not shut. You
are here.
notes for reading:- Stand, in heavy shoes, on a round tidal rock and at the end of each line kick off, with downward heel, a limpet. Thus demonstrating impermanence, unpredictability.
Professional Reviews
Will Daunt: Envoi 142
'...As they stand, the verse sections of the various rooms convey the coherent and rewarding variety of a very visual patchwork. However, the accompanying "notes for reading" have a dynamic and entirely different effect on the reader... a lot of the "notes for reading" are amusing, underlining writers' pomposity and loss of a sense of irony... '
Tim Allen: Terrible Work
‘For me this book is by far the best thing that Sam Smith has done…. The Rooms poems have a concrete presence while yet being enigmatic - they have a sense of absurd ritual. Perhaps the aim is more satirical than ironic but I have a hunch that this work has almost achieved an effect in excess of its author's intention - might be wrong. ‘
Robin Ouzman Hislop's poetry is certainly in dialogue with some of the key architects of the 'poetics of indeterminacy' – both the Modernist strands represented by the likes of Beckett and Stein, and the postmodernist strands represented, initially,
