Reviews of Jared Smith’s Lake Michigan and Other Poems…                 

There is a gentle kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith’s best work, an  understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes  you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda.  Whatever his subject matter, whether it is a man adrift in a lifeboat or an epic vision of Lake Michigan, Smith’s poems are journeys worth taking.

             --Joseph Bruchac, poet, storyteller, and Editor, Greenfield Review Press

Again and again, Jared Smith takes us into a world that we feel is strange and impossible, only to make us see, suddenly, that this IS our life, our condition, and until now we have been shying away from reality.  Years ago, on my author-interview show on  NPR, I hailed Jared as "the most important new voice in American poetry since Walt Whitman."  The comparison is strengthened with LAKE MICHIGAN AND OTHER POEMS.  Here is Whitman's embrace of the vast complexity of American life, including updates in electronics and politics.  Here is Whitman reincarnate making poetry out of our most casual, colloquial,  idiomatic talk.  But we must admit one significant difference.  At his best, Jared Smith speaks with an intensity that Walt rarely reached and that only Seamus Heaney can match.  

            --Walter James Miller, poet, translator, and verse dramatist

The magnum opus of Jared Smith’s new collection is “Lake Michigan,” truly a major poem. Because of its reach and depth, he will inevitably be compared to Sandburg and Whitman, as his lake becomes the “sea of experience” encompassing Chicago and the other cities of its shores. He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facts of our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose.

Esthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K Williams and compare his work favorably. These are bold poems of tempered experience, often as remarkable for their graceful sensitivity as their scope.

            --Harry Smith, poet, essayist; Editor, The Smith Press

"LAKE MICHIGAN, opened, is a new territory. I find myself reading in cycles, spiraling back through a passage — to catch what I've sensed at the edges of what I just passed through."

       --Gene Fowler, poet