Martin Corless-Smith - Drawing from memoir, poetry, aphorism and daybook, the book reads like an accident scene before the police arrive: it’s quiet, haunted, and speculative

Martin Corless-Smith, This Fatal Looking Glass, SplitLevel Texts, 2015.

A man in his forties is walking along the embankment of the river Thames. He has recently abandoned his marriage and has thus imperilled his care and responsibility for his son whom he loves. He now does not know if he is experiencing freedom, or a condition of being irrevocably lost. Or are these the same? His brain, or so he has read, is a contorted maze of surfaces (he must look this up). But then what was the reality of the so called outside world? One so seldom saw or touched anything except a surface—that of the glittering river, for instance, which was like a looking glass, or like love. Unless one jumped in and drowned, that is. But then, might not life and death seem the same? Especially if one were a poet or a painter. Which he was. Both, I mean."—Nicholas Mosley

Drawing from memoir, poetry, aphorism and daybook, the poet Martin Corless-Smith’s beautiful first novel, This Fatal Looking Glass, reads like an accident scene before the police arrive: it’s quiet, haunted, and speculative. A few characters are developed enough so that the reader feels a real friendship between two men and the anxiety and grief of the protagonist who, lurching between two women and two countries, flails with the shifting demands of love, responsibility, and fatherhood. But more than character or plot, it is the quality of the language, so sparked with insights about art, failure, resistance, eros, and literature, that makes the book memorable. It’s a novel focused upon an examination of the self—ourselves—and on the links between desire and guilt, hope and refusal. - Forrest Gander 



Martin Corless-Smith, Bitter Green, Fence Books, 2015.
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Over a stream of metaphysically gilt lyrics, Martin Corless-Smith has undertaken to limn the soul within limits of body, time, and interrelation. In conversation with classicism and location, sieving gloss and dross in easeful tune, he has written a continuous verse of grace within our time. In this new work we find him losing and lost yet buoyant in visions.

“From ‘How has it come to this?’ to ‘How can we go on?’ as a sequence the poems move towards affirmation, writing through the breakup of a marriage and the death of the mother, on, into and through a recovery of attention, observation, thought, and pleasure in the world… With their reflections on love, death, and self, the poems in their sequence mirror thought’s attention . . . through resonances quietly drawn from such as Donne, Herrick, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth. Like the bitter greens from which it takes its name, the book’s astringency is packed with hidden rewards and essential nourishment. Powerful stuff.” —Peter Quartermain

Martin Corless-Smith limns the lyric soul within limits of body, time, and interrelation. In this new work we find him losing and lost yet buoyant in visions of classicism and location.

I have finished a moment more lasting than bronze
A fresh nothing held up to the face of Boreas
When I look for myself I am not even there
Everything has escaped through the fingers of my goddess


Martin Corless-Smith, English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul, Fence Books, 2010.
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Moving freely through poetry's pictorial fragmentariness and literal fragments of prose, with a streaming, equanimous, nondiscriminatory referentiality, Martin Corless-Smith proposes and confers with entities in "the janus-faced doorway" of antiquity and contemporaneity--the "experience and the coming-into-history of that experience."

“The paradox of self-knowledge (how can the the perceiver—a subject—become the perceived—an object—without becoming something other than itself?) seems to mirror the paradox of time (what can we say of the present instant before it is already past?). The self, as well as time, is a ‘stranger to the direct gaze,’ as Martin Corless-Smith puts it in his mesmerizing new volume. Here, Romantic discourses on the soul are playfully and obliquely reconstituted via intertextual strategies worthy of Borges and Jabès. In a work crossed by alternate selves and alternate literary histories, Corless-Smith brilliantly evokes the mystery and melancholia of being in time.” —Andrew Joron
"Thought exists and has this book's solidity... [In Martin Corless-Smith's beautifully etched dictions, there is an older English we only now recognize, caught midway between England and America but rooted in both, and in bodies and consciousness, in the struggles of this century, where 'substance and accident' deliver us to presence, in 'modest love'." - Erin Mouré

RAIN TAXI REVIEW OF BOOKS: English Fragments Review
THE COLORADO REVIEW: Book Notes by Broc Rossell
GALATEA RESURRECTS: English Fragments Review


Martin Corless-Smith, Swallows, Fence Books, 2006. 
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Swallows uses the metaphor of the House to explore the uncanny presence and absence of self, and world, in poetry. With embodiments ranging from the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of the Sabine Villa—a search determined to locate a physical site behind Horace’s celebrated verse—to lines transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while they reify the beguiling distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.
Swallows is a continuation of Nota‘s neo-Romantic desire to react through words to some original world—to see that world as poetical and meaningful even as we acknowledge that the body of the poet vanishes in the instant of the poem, that the world is not manifest in the poem, and that it is impossible to know just what of the world or the self is ever iterable.
“We are swallowed up irreparably, irrevocably, irremediably . . . envy the sparrows and the swallows, yea.—John Donne”

"Swallows reminds us of course that writing great lyric is painstaking. On several occasions Corless-Smith seems almost obsessed with his own limitations, presenting cross-outs and revealing the indecision involved in realizing a poem--whether outlining an idea is necessary, or letting it lie implicit with fragment presents a truer truth. So those who've done it well are to be celebrated, and that they can be celebrated by exiting the limitations of the flat reality of things as they are and inhabiting the impossible house of language they unwittingly constructed. In the end, the book--the poet too? Up to you--possesses a mania that leaves you feeling you've been there to return." - John Deming



Martin Corless-Smith, Nota, Fence Books, 2003.

NOTA is part travelogue and part philosophical examination. Corless-Smith makes a compendium: layers of reference, of history, of text over text over text. Invented and real figures watch over the Self in crisis, the Self in epiphanies of clarity, pleasure, disgust, self-disgust, and inquiry; a Self whose inclusive scope admits to a history beyond the moment of consumption.

Contemporary. The Latinate meaning of the word is obvious: being together in time; belonging to time. Our contemporaries, quite simply, are those who also write poems in this era — post-modern, post-post-modern, or whatever designation stands highest now in current opinion. The contemporary bookshelf locates time in those books whose copyright is our current year (or nearly so), whose covers can be shelved next to our covers. Our contemporary words are inked on pages that stand next to each other but seldom are open to each other, laid upon each other, allowed to communicate past merely “being in print.” Our contemporaries, for the most part, are our loose company — all dressed in dust-jackets, nowhere to go.
      I am writing an essay on my contemporary, Martin Corless-Smith. I find a distinct pleasure in the undertaking: first, because Corless-Smith’s work is so deeply endeared to me; second, because, among the poets of our generation whose work I am familiar with, he most successfully and necessarily attacks, sings, lauds, destroys, expands what that very word, contemporary, means.
      But, for a moment, let me turn aside. The question of being contemporary is by no means a new question, nor is it simply about time. It is not a question that merely explores between whom words are spoken, but of greater weight, explores how language exists in time, lives (or doesn’t) on the page. Plato’s Phaedrus unfolds erotic inquiry into such nervous rhetoric. To be brief, the young and beautiful Phaedrus has just come from hearing Lysias speak on the virtues of the non-lover (literally: one not possessed by eros). Phaedrus actually has the words written on papyrus hidden in his sleeve. Socrates asks to hear the speech; Phaedrus recites it to him; then, Phaedrus convinces Socrates to speak in return. And he does — twice. First, in agreement with Lysias, and then, to recant the blasphemy of his speech against the living word of eros.
      This erotic philosophizing masks a profound critique of the written word: it must be alive to be loved, and life dwells more in the present tense than on the page. Reading is the activity of adding breath back to words: we re-inspire, we bring them back into time, not as argument inked on page, not as dusty tribute to beauty gone, not as memorial at all, but pulsing, speaking, being. The poet is a lover, and we the beloved. True attention reverses the order exquisitely. It is only through such attention that a living rhetoric, a loving poetic, can thrive. Such is Plato’s point. The body of the page and the body are akin. And such is my preface to entering into Corless-Smith’s work. For he is poet not only worthy of such effort on our part, but is a poet whose work records in writing the struggle of such reading, perceiving, and living.
Martin Corless-Smith is a contemporary English poet who lives the majority of the year in the Western United States. He has written three books of poetry: Of Piscator, Complete Travels, and Nota. To open these pages is to find that “contemporary” is a word deserving of more attention, and more exact attention, than we have yet given it. We hear in the music of Corless-Smith’s language the long lyric history of English verse. He is as adept in the conceits of metaphysical poetry as he is in the tones and tunes of seventeenth-century verse; the strings upon which he strums are held taut by centuries. Name his lyre: Tradition.
      In the seventeenth century, and so for the next one hundred years, a particular English formation changed “contemporary” to “co-temporary.” This subtle change fascinates, and holds meaning for the kind of inquiry we’re trying to make. Suddenly, rather than a word that recognizes a temporal togetherness, we have a word that directly implies time in a more complex manner. We are “co-temporary.” What belongs to time is owned by time, subject to the Fates; what is born in time ends by time’s scythe. Like Plato’s ideal dialectic, like his ideal love, to be co-temporary recognizes that the work of poetry is of the moment in the most radically present way possible. Poetry’s oral tradition keeps this notion from being lost — the magic of a poetry reading is not the force of the author’s personality, but the unique insight gained in hearing mortal words in a mortal mouth. The reading emphasizes this point: Right now I am alive, you are alive, and these words are alive between us. This unity, this being contemporary, is my concern here.

Second — Tradition & the Rhizome Yet, to be honest not only to Corless-Smith’s work, but to my own hopes, we must place this “being contemporary” into relationship with tradition. These two words which seems so blatantly dichotomous, so irreconcilable with each other, must be seen as the most delicate counterpoint by which the music of this work is heard, the syncopation by which the largest rhythm in the work (larger than a poem or a book alone) is felt. To understand the project, as in an alchemical experiment, we must marry opposites.       Corless-Smith’s second book, Complete Travels, opens with a long poem, “Worcestershire Mass,” the first section of which is entitled, “Nativity.” To open with such a poem makes a wondrous sense, particularly in regard to Corless-Smith’s project. The word multiplies significantly. First, a song celebrating Jesus’s birth, and one which takes part in a long and often anonymous tradition. Later, a sense of one’s own being born, especially as regards the place in which one is born. And later still, to be born into servitude. The poem opens so:       Now    Now    Nowl    Nowl       bec o me ma other       Nor Nor       mothers       poor poor bobtail       poor peewit       the bed prepared       wi’ ailanthus chorus childs       a green vase       I was       we was       were was       born       into December Year       road place Somewhere in the music of the opening stanza, as the language struggles into and out of meaning, I can hear a profound insight: any utterance of “Now” can only stay Now by echolalia made infinite. Indeed, to print the word Now is paradox itself, and the language understands this difficulty, closing off the open vowel of “-ow” with an “-l,” closing off the impossible meaning of the word, and bringing it, as it closes itself off in sound (even though nonsensical), into daily experience. “Now” recalls the exact moment of birth, a zero never reclaimed, from which point life entwines itself with time thereafter, and struggle is not merely existence, but as the language in line 2 indicates, is the struggle of becoming... self ... other... another... as all around us is “becoming,” too. Birth, too, is birth into place, into nest, into “the bed prepared.” By the third stanza an immense work has been accomplished: as “Now” becomes “Nowl,” so “I am” becomes “I was.” More, “I,” that word which we all simultaneously use to express our inmost self, becomes a hazy boundary, exists equally and validly in the “we.” To think that “I am” is more real than “we are” is delusion. That emphasis on the “we were,” when pressed upon, unfolds into Tradition. It does so in a particular place in Corless-Smith’s poetic: December, that month of absolute end and absolute beginning, alpha and omega, and all the symbolic weight, natural and religious, that the word for the month can bear.       Turning to almost any page in Corless-Smith’s books reifies the above. Syntax, diction, rhyme, the authorial leaning toward song and pastoral, all combine to create a work that is simultaneously “contemporary” and “traditional.” In a lesser poet, I’d recommend wariness. There can be a hollow cleverness in appropriating a previous century’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, a collaging rather than a disclosing, a proof of Ph.D. diploma rather than, as Emerson puts it, the beautiful resting on the shoulders of necessity. But in Corless-Smith’s work, this confusion of time present and time past, this inviting of other voices into his voice, his pages multiplying and implying other pages than his own, is necessary, is beautiful. That beauty understands Tradition in the most radical terms.       T.S. Eliot, in his in/ famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” provides us an unexpected ground. I quote at length: Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity [ital. mine]. Eliot’s point, fully seen, resonates through literary theory today. Whatever Tradition is to the poet, it is not, if the poet is alive to the life of the work that precedes him, mere archeology, mere bones. Indeed, Tradition is a conglomerate life that against the pin-point of “I,” or even “I am a poet,” overwhelms as a candle held up to the sun is a small light swallowed by light’s larger source. To write a poem adds to Tradition — exerts a pressure on what Tradition was before this addition. None is static — the whole breathes. To understand how to open one’s self to the living pressure of Tradition is not only the most fundamental activity of Keats’s “negative capability,” but is the moral underpinning of the poet. It is upon us to read and write in such a way that those before us are alive in us — and us within them. This is no defense of formalism — how easy, then, it would be, if to write a sonnet sequence qualified one instantly as a writer. Rather, the work of Tradition is the most radically experimental we have before us to do.       Guattari and Deleuze offer a helpful guide in the enterprise, and further emphasize the radical (read: of or pertaining to roots), for their notion of the rhizome, to crib from their own lexicon, is a map laid upon Eliot’s “tradition.” The largest life form on the planet is a fungus that stretches across most of the Midwest of North America. It is not solid like a mushroom or toadstool, but is a filigree of spider-silk fineness. There is no center to it, no head, no heart. There is no “canon” without which the whole cannot live. Tradition, to the contemporary poet, might be described by the same terms.       What grace it is when the world provides the metaphor that clarifies the nature of the world. I suppose it cannot be different. Tradition, like the rhizome, is singular and multiple simultaneously. To tear a section out causes no harm to the whole — it simply offers a new shoot, a new plane, a plateau, upon which the next rhizome grows. It is but nostalgia to say literature would die if Milton were removed — except for the person who has read Milton so deeply that Milton lives in her own voice. And that joining, when a reading of such depth has occurred, is also given image by Guattari and Deleuze: the orchid and the wasp. We enter into that which mimics us, which we mimic, and that action, that taking of voice and style, that undoing self to become self and other at once, is Tradition’s truest work.       It is also Martin Corless-Smith’s work. As idiosyncratic as his voice is among contemporary letters, it is also Anonymous. The Anonymous is Tradition’s highest ideal. Anonymous speaks with every tongue.

Third — Self-Noting Anonymous is the singular figure for Everyone. Everyone is not eloquent — at least not in the typical understanding of the word. Everyone’s tongue is not oiled if it speaks true, is not a flatterer’s tongue. Far from it. Everyone speaks from every angle at once — self-vaunting and self-destroying, angel and devil, child and adult, and every age and angle there between. Everyone does not speak in straight lines. When Everyone is eloquent, it is as Emily Dickinson describes, “when the Heart has not a Voice to spare.” And where there is no voice to spare, whose voice speaks? “Mine?” “I?” “This me that is myself?”       Martin Corless-Smith’s new book, Nota, takes upon itself this difficult articulation, and it is in examining this book in what detail I can muster, with which I will bring my considerations to a close.       Toward the latter half of Nota (explanation for such vague location will soon arrive) is a transcript from a metaphysical court, titled “Upon Accusation.” In it, “ACCUSE” delivers this imperative: “Then Speak.” The answer enlightens the project of the book, of the poetic:       DEFEND:      My story is as everyone’s                         though for that seldom heard                         Some deeds run close to several aims                         not one can singly be the cause                         I have an instinct for complexity                         It is not dishonesty. That the trial here does not occur between an Accuser and Defender, between a Prosecution and a Defense, locates the space of the trial within a single consciousness. Here is an argument between two self-imperatives: Accuse and Defend. The deep interiority of the location of this trial speaks to the heart of Nota’s concerns — the Self that contains in it not only the space for diametrically opposed positions (self-trial, self-defense, self-sentencing, self-judging, self-exonerating... ), but, in my mind, the bass-note eloquence by which the music of the whole book must be heard.       Corless-Smith brings to our attention the awful crucible of the Self. Yes, this story that is mine is as everyone’s — and yet, that story, that being a me, being an I, being a self in the world is a complexity that can only be lived as a me, an I, a self. To deal with that complexity complexly, as Defend says, is not dishonesty. That “instinct for complexity” may be the only honesty we can trust.       Nota betrays definitions. First, the easy sense of self already, albeit briefly, touched upon. Second, within the construction of the book itself. The book is without a table of contents — it itself is its contents. The book, for the most part, is without page numbers. The book is filled with quotes and passages taken from other authors, some of which are fictional. These two realms, self and book, are anything but unrelated. In order to understand, or grope toward what understanding we can validly achieve, we must revoke the impulse to explain and define that which the book itself revokes. Instead, following Keats (in Nota referenced by referencing The New York Times Book Review quoting Keats’s famous letter — a labyrinth of reference) we must become capable “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact.” That the reference is embedded in reference reinforces the difficulty that both the self in Nota and the book Nota present. One is born into a language before one speaks it. A book is made of language that we assume derives from a self governing that language, when a closer attention understands that Authorship is an authority riddled with doubt. The language is profoundly influenced — composed not only in/ of the personality through which the words filter, but of that personality as it itself was formed by language: books, anecdotes, fictions, lives of those around us, the pressure of our own names, the hum of language that is ever-present, unavoidable, ubiquitous as air. Corless-Smith, in one of the epigrams that opens the book, names this difficulty as precisely as it can be named. In the words of David Jones, “one is trying to make a shape out of the very things of which oneself is made.”       What are we made of? Body, mind, soul. Words. Other’s words. A lifetime of experience, and the continual re-echoing through the self of all the selves we have been: child, adult, lover, betrayer, student, zealot, iconoclast... Also, the world. The material of the world. The physical fact in which we dwell, live, breathe. Ancient Greek drama had in it the chorus. The public would move as one body, speak as one voice, and give us (the audience) sight into what we could not otherwise know. Corless-Smith, too, speaks in chorus. Rather, chorus speaks in him — not in unison, but simultaneously, and in unnumbered pages, records that complex, multi-selved, speaking. For example:       I would give up all       for  me except myself       I am       I would give up       *       confound solutions with obscurities       *       You ask you may you survive this sight       you won’t survive yourself...       *       I find when I am done and spent eternity       my heart is youngest in its blood       My eats fucks shits what is beyond this state       what fits this body now is what I wear today The self is irrevocable — even suicide confirms it. The self is a death sentence. The self is ensouled, is eternal. The self is not self-sufficient. We eat; we digest. We are sieves. We are penetrated and penetrate.       Nota not only attends to these difficulties — a feat in itself — but enacts them. As truly as we eat and shit, we read and write. A book, in part, is erotic, because it must be opened to be read, to be enjoyed, used, experienced... fallen in love with, or abused.       If you have not suffered from behind the indignities of the fuck       thrust from behind, the full throat       If you have never another inside       or the walk from that or walk to that No boundary holds. No, nor dignity. The book is a self, and by the wisdom of verse (etymologically: turn), the self is also a book. We must be broken to be read. Is there now any wonder why it can be so mercifully difficult to read a poet of genuine vision? The pages unnumbered because a self is not a linear subject. Quotes from authors fictional and actual, because a self is filled with other’s words, misplaced, remembered oddly, made up — and none of this ventriloquism equals a lie. It is true not because we are true, but because we exist.       Tell me: Who is the Reliable Narrator?                                §          §          § Nota contains a book within a book, “A Selection from the Works of Thomas Swan.” This book is 12 pages long, each page numbered. The “Selection” is composed of poems in manuscript, and notes from Swan’s “Notebooks.” Inside the order of the pages is a more subtle order.        On my brother W[illiam] falling from his horse       Was not the horses [sic] start       what made it start was not       A shadow or a hare afoot       as sense of something sudden near the heart       You fell on your right side       to break your arm and dignity       a fellow helped you catch your ride       who you did not know or see       before you fell. And afterwards       a different beast your horse       and afterwards yourself somehow       the earth had entered through your breast       This land of your no longer yours       but you its curious gift       each leaf a painted diadem       an atom in a leaf This verse turns on wisdom. No shadow or hare made the horse rear, but a sense of something near to the heart. The rider — Authority, Author — is thrown. Being thrown lets the earth enter into your breast. The world enters the self by the self being broken. And then the world is not your gift, but you a gift to the world. What is sudden here is how quickly the Reader becomes the Read, how instantaneous the subject becomes the object. The world’s grammar, and so ours, is not easy, is not simply Subject-Verb-Object — the terms reverse, and we become subjected to another’s gaze.       The nature of the material of this book within a book is worth noting, especially given the metaphysics of self with which Nota deals. Corless-Smith gives us writings that imply a definite self: poems begun but not finished, lines excised and crossed out, grammatical mistakes left intact, and the wondrous visions of nature recorded in the notebooks on color. So personal does Thomas Swan’s work feel, I can almost imagine the type in handwriting, and the page in my hand as I hold ages a century.       This definite self feels like an oasis inside the tortured examination of self that always undoes self in the rest of Nota. The page numbers themselves create a sense of order the rest of Nota refuses. Thomas Swan feels like a solution, until one realizes that Thomas Swan does not exist. He is a fiction.       Corless-Smith does not write this book within a book as a trick. His point, I think, is quiet and profound. What orders the world for us can be both true and false at once. Our own definite self, the sense of being able to say “I am,” or “I am a _______,” is both true and false at once. Thomas Swan pays attention to the world outside him with revelatory detail; Corless-Smith pays as precise attention to the world within the self. Hovering somewhere between the two approaches is the genuine work of poetry: of helping us to see that the self and the world are interpenetrating, inter-accusing and inter-defending, are neither the definition of the other, but more miraculously, help each other to defy all definition.       That work, incredibly, is given in Nota — given, actually, by William Swan, the brother who fell off the horse, and who, for all I know, did exist. The medium of Prophecy is rightfully words. Meanings that unfold in time... [a] cluster of signification out of which we must read our meaning. Either the cluster remains meaningless to us... or we accept our prophecy... as the words are our prediction. Let us not muddy such waters with fantasies of embracing that which has yet to happen... prophecy names the next chapter, the roots of which might naturally enough be seen in our current, temporary fixations... We ask of Prophecy a resolution which is only this; an opportunity to read.                                     — William Swan, The Apocrypha of Being Words unfold in time but are not time themselves. Like us who utter them, they have something eternal about them, something never touched by time’s mortal fetters, something illuminating as much as ink is darkening.       I don’t know what it means to be contemporary, to be co-temporary. We exist together in time, but we do something in which time makes little sense. We can read Keats in the New York Times. Milton dictates not only to his daughters, but to us as well. What I hope, and why I turn to the authors I do, why I consider Martin Corless-Smith exemplary and read his pages with such care, is that the Prophecy is this: to be contemporary is to be able to be read. To be able to read. I can think of no better gift to each other than that: The opportunity to read. - Dan Beachy-Quick

"Dear reader, take care of this book. It's important and amazing- a vast conversation and meditation- an investigation into the "stupend symptom" of the self in poetry and writing. ' I AM NO FREE AGENCY,' the text tells us: 'terror for myself and those dear'; 'stiff vein into a nether heart.' The language of this book changes musically from the 17th century to the contemporary; the punctuation and grammar shift necessarily and curiously. Lyric quatrains appear and reappear, suggesting a long poem struggling for completion. Sorrow and brightness fall among the words. A search for the self here undertakes the discovery of itself in our own time, when political, social, and religious gridirons no longer hold on to us. We are disjunctives: 'My story is as everyone's/ though for that seldom heard.' Among the many quotations within the conversations of this book, I think the courage of it is especially indebted to the meditations of Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, placed, so to speak, alongside Wittgenstein's linguistic edge. Urne Buriall: 'But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy.'" - Robin Blaser
                           

Martin Corless-Smith, Complete Travels, West House Books, 2000.

In Martin Corless-Smith's poems there are many voices, heard and misheard in fragments fused in startling array. They are dialect poems, but the dialect undergoes constant shift, a wealth of vernacular only loosely bound to time and place: grammar twists and bends as echoes are sounded of an older written language, lively ghosts of speech. Corless-Smith embraces the themes and devices of the pastoral, with and without irony, to create the rituals of Worcestershire Mass and the intermittent masque of The Garden. These poems seem always to demand performance, but it is a performance they also, for the sheer pleasure of unruliness, resist.  

Original...His...evocation of older poetries transcends expectations about what we are obliged to term linguistically innovative poetry. - Jacket Magazine

There's...a sense of antiquarian exploration...but also a poetic exploration of almost Olsonian breadth. Stimulating stuff, all round. - Shearsman Magazine



Martin Corless-Smith, Of Piscator: Poems, University of Georgia Press 1998.

This is a collection of poems by Martin Corless-Smith. Populated by snakes, birds, vines, insects and mysterious lovers, Of Piscator is a dreamscape of natural and manmade jungles.