The Light in the Film

Drawing on characters from Tosca to Lew Welch to Henry Purcell and on landscapes from Mexico to Hell to Saratoga Springs, Jordan Smith’s sixth collection of poems is a wide-ranging consideration of the world viewed in the light of loss and restitution. Smith’s lyrics look for likenesses found in the combination of the unlikely, and they discover, in the do-it-yourself culture of America, a determined, eccentric resistance to time’s erosions. Adrian Frazier of the National University of Ireland said of this collection: “You won’t find any better wisdom, or memorable music, in the back catalogues of your favourite songbooks. For my money, then, Jordan Smith’s The Light in the Film is great poetry.”