Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 marks preeminent sound poet Steven Ross
Smith's return to verse form. In this sixth chapter of what's become for
Smith a life-poem (a long poem that encompasses a life), Smith bends,
confuses, and disintegrates the fundamental premises of poetic and
fictive form--working language, narrative, and meaning like sculptural
material, and engaging with comp-osition by sound and its visual
placement on the page.
These poems emanate from specific works by other poets. Exalt in Smith's
highly torqued and playful language that riffs off of bpNichol, Sylvia
Legris, Federico Garcï¿1/2a Lorca, Lisa Robertson, and other seminal
poetic masters, in this charged, frenetic work that deals in nature's
precariousness and social conundrums.
Steven Ross Smith's Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 'Sounds like Futurism /
looks like Charades.' It's meant to provoke second-sight and attention
to echoes, to what shimmers and whispers in the sensuality of sense.
--George Elliott Clarke, 2002 winner of the Governor General's Literary
Award for Poetry for Execution Poems
Smith lays everything on the table for an earth under siege from high
finance, rampant human pollution, and wars of the supermarkets. His
lines spill and flow like winding rivers or lapping waves laced with
erotically sensuous word-scents that take us to what flutters just
within and without our grasp. -- Meredith Quartermain, author of
Rupert's Land
Steven Ross Smith's Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 both sets its own
landing field and touches down, in poetry that bucks and soars. Even the
hyphens dart about in this surprise-fest, this portrait of the poet as
renewer and renewed. --Gerald Hill, author of Hillsdale Book
