Poetry. 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.

Complete Travels

Literature & Fiction

Corless-Smith, Martin

Poetry

West House Books

Swallows uses the metaphor of the House to explore the uncanny presence and absence of self, and world, in poetry.

Swallows

United States

Fence Books

The Poet's Tomb contains five interconnecting essays that explore the idea of consciousness in poetry, tracking work from Anne Carson and Sappho to W.G.Sebald's and artist Paul Nash's take on Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall. Using a mixture of contemporary theory, philosophy, poetry and art, the book explores ideas of the dichotomy of mind and body, determined to locate consciousness (the soul) and the sublime in the deictic articulations of the material. The central essay, The Poet's Tomb, discusses the fixation of locating a poet's body as a desire to place the uncanny "living" aspect of the poem in the body of the poet, and eventually in the place of internment. Exploring the work of poets ranging from Virgil to Alice Notley, the essay attempts to unpick the nostalgia for origins of poetic consciousness in the person of the poet and to see poetry as a communal apparatus that provides an exosomatic material realm of consciousness, something akin to Heidegger's description of language as the house of Being. Every poem an epitaph, every poem a ticket to ride, from Sappho's "bittersweet" eroticism to the "wild civility" of Robert Herrick. Martin Corless-Smith is a poet, painter, and translator of canonical poems, and each of these vocations is on view in this memorable defense of poetry as he reads from Virgil to Notley in sight of the impossible blue of Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredan and Piranesi's otherworldly Pyramid of Cestius while contemplating the paradoxes of the finite body of the poet dreaming immortal poetry. --Keith Tuma Querying the embodiment of poetry, Corless-Smith begins in the body of the poet--living and/or dead--and passes from there through the body of the reader in order to argue the mutual construction of the body of a poem as a shared body and a new commons, which, like all things vital to survival--air, water, hope--must be maintained as open and available to all. These succinct, elegant essays perform this maintenance and, in the process, return us to all poetry charged with the energy and insight necessary to continue that maintenance ourselves. --Cole Swensen MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH was born and raised in Worcestershire, United Kingdom. He has a BA and MFA in painting and printmaking as well as an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD in Creative writing from the University of Utah. He has published seven collections of poetry, most recently The Fool & The Bee (Shearsman, UK 2018), a novel, This Fatal Looking Glass (SplitLevel Press, 2015) and a translation, Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace (Miami University Press, 2019). He is currently working on translating contemporary Italian poetry.

The Poet's Tomb (Illuminations: A American Poetics)

History & Criticism

Parlor Press

Poetry. "A masque: it's all a mask, celebrating the 'organic'...British nature (transplants to US), in layers of spring and subsequent decay, within a long cultural history and a (to middle age) lifespan, personal pain, modernization, human war, gods and goddesses speaking anywhere. The poem has an enormous and muscular musicality (including prose musicality); the Poet constantly wondering how to Bee, how a Fool can Bee (symbol of all good qualities, sunniness, industry, royalty and divinity, various Saints)...A stunning, pleasurable book."--Alice Notley "Martin Corless-Smith is a gifted and brilliant poet. His work is filled with poesy and all that can mean for the depth of the art. The mind is vertical as it moves through the master box of diction and form. Here is a generous voice with wild lyric runs and gorgeous music throughout--we are only made richer by this tender work. THE FOOL AND THE BEE is a fabulous book of the poetic imagination."--Peter Gizzi

The Fool and The Bee

Shearsman Books

Poetry. In THE MELANCHOLY OF ANATOMY; his ninth collection of poetry; Martin Corless-Smith turns his attention towards ageing and mortality; and in particular to the death of his father. Shifting between formal verse and prose; from the metaphysical to the whimsical; from surreal to anecdotal; the book moves between poetic articulations as a mind might through memories; sifting to find anything to hold on to as everything flows and falls away. At times melancholic at times nihilistic at times luminous and dark; this collection asks questions about poetry; memory and what it is to have loved and lived.

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Poetry. ODIOUS HORIZONS ransacks and revives Horace for our contemporary world. Part translations, part re-visionings, these radical (yet often formal) lyrics offer the stoical, joyful praise for a simple life away from the insidious and toxic world of political power and material obsession. What was Roman is now American and British, and the terrifying horizons that were clear to Horace, the end game of greed, the downfall of the Republic, is here even more alarming as we see rivers rise and hear the drums of civil war once more. "ODIOUS HORIZONS fast-forwards Horace's Odes, written in 23 BC, into percussive poems of today. As Horace addressed the Tiber, Maecenas or the grass of Mars, Martin Corless-Smith addresses the president, the brown Potomac, the lake of time, and Worcestershire... In luscious crossfire, with brilliant wordplay, Corless-Smith smacks down ode, the address to a particular subject meant to be sung... with masterful, acute control and unexpected ludic shifts amidst motifs of friendship, love, chronos and kairos, war and peace, and an abiding ethical insight... Odious Horizons is consummate poetry for our time."--Norma Cole "Here's Horace arriving in the 21st century, seeking solace where he can, even in England: not the Augustan but still the mindful Horace, keeping his hand in while keeping an eye out: a Horace who won't waste a word, a pithy world-wary Horace, friend well-met in such gobby times."--Alan Halsey "Martin Corless-Smith's versions of Horace bankrupt the heart of its false commodities and plastic gods, robbing us of exactly what we need stolen--desire's guilty gilt that would turn ornate and hollow our simplest cares. As for Horace, so for us: a world of political opprobrium, the alarm of endless wars, needless luxuries. These poems serve as bracing tonic--in their wit, in their earthy care, in their frank kindness--to our age just as they have sung us back to health for thousands of years. What's bitter here is a swig of local beer, and the talk is public talk, our daily cares, our simple loves. What more could any reader ask of a book of poetry than to be invited into the poem itself, and once there, to learn to sing those songs that give us back our ordinary hearts--just as it has given me back mine, just as it will give you back your own."--Dan Beachy-Quick

Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace

Miami University Press

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."

English Fragments A Brief History of the Soul

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 bronzeA fresh nothing held up to the face of BoreasWhen I look for myself I am not even thereEverything has escaped through the fingers of my goddessMartin Corless-Smith is a native of Worcestershire, England. He is the author of five books of poems and one of fiction. He is professor of creative writing at Boise State University.

Bitter Green

Verde amargo: (Edición Bilingüe) (Spanish Edition)

Buenos Aires Poetry

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Books by Corless-Smith, Martin