Thoreau's Lost Journal: Poems

by Larry Smith

Overview

In this new expanded edition, here are poems as dramatic projections of the character and spirit of American author and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. In Smith's poems we get inside the mind and heart of Thoreau and see his life as his greatest work of art. One gains a deeper appreciation of Thoreau as person and as an enlightened spirit of America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947504066
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	03/21/2018
Edition description:	Revised and expanded
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Larry Smith lives with his wife Ann in Huron, Ohio where he is professor emeritus of English and humanities from Firelands College of Bowling Green State University. He has studied at the Thoreau Institute and has written on the life and writings of Henry David Thoreau. He is the author of eight books of poetry, five books of fiction, and literary biographies of writers Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Smith is also writer-producer of two video programs on poets James Wright and Kenneth Patchen done with filmmaker Tom Koba.

His own memoirs have appeared in Milldust and Roses (2005) and The Thick of Thin: Memoirs of a Working-Class Writer (2017). He and Mei Hui Huang are co-translators of Chinese Zen Poems: What Hold Has This Mountain? and The Kanshi Poems Taigu Ryokan (both from Bottom Dog Press). In 1999 he received the Ohioana Poetry Award for his contributions to poetry in Ohio. Smith is the director of Bottom Dog Press, an independent Ohio literary publisher for over 30 years.

Read an Excerpt

In Which Henry David

Flies and Walks with Cranes





Walking through morning mist along the Sudbury

I come upon the remains of a summer crane,

soft feathers and light bones in a dense thicket.

I look out across the flowing waters and ask,

What is this animal life?

This crane had flown its instinctual patterns,

hatched its broods of young without need

of philosophy or commerce.

Its suffering was surely answered by its

mute acceptance, yet who cannot recall

a crane in flight wings and body serving each other

exerting themselves in a rush to live,

deep shudders through its body

the pulse of cause and effect.

In this reflexive vision we sense

all that we are and might become.

To watch this flying emblem

without greed for its beauty or

grief for its impermanence

is to come upon the way.

For though it one day struggles

to its end among the weeds, we must

see without despair, know another rises

in the morning s melting air.

Reading Group Guide

Thoreau's cabin, interior

Interviews

This journal of poems is an imaginative work based on years of reading Henry David Thoreau s writing, particularly his journals, correspondence, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and, of course, Walden: Life in the Woods.



Thoreau kept his journals in blank books, each uniquely colored and textured. When shipping them in a wooden box to the publisher, one was truly lost. This is a projection of what it might have held.

Though Henry seldom wrote of his emotional life, he closely studied himself as subject and watched others as natural beings, and so his sensitive side can be felt. At times here, his own words seemed the best possible and have been woven in. I have traveled and learned much in Concord. I find his voice as essential as sun and rain.

 

Editorial Reviews

Smith finds a nourishing grace in simple familiar things. His deep intuitive poems devotions really shimmer with an openness to the natural world, a quality shared with poets Kenneth Rexroth, Lucien Stryk, and Oriental Zen masters. -George Myers Jr.





These poems are crisp, lucid, exact. They keep one hand always in contact with the earth, the other on the skin .I am moved by all of them: the regard for work, for tools, for the turns of phrase, for the legacy of sayings and skills.-Scott Russell Sanders //



Smith finds a nourishing grace in simple familiar things. His deep intuitive poems devotions really shimmer with an openness to the natural world, a quality shared with poets Kenneth Rexroth, Lucien Stryk, and Oriental Zen masters. -George Myers Jr.

From the Publisher