Prayers for the Dead, and Other Poems

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This is Michael Smith’s first collection since his Collected Poems of 2009, and is an elegiac volume. As the author says: Let me try to define prayer as I am using it here. It is a voice in the head, ours and not ours. It speaks in words we scarcely understand. Unstoppable, unless distracted by our quotidian pursuits. Beckett said it thus: ‘All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody is prayer.’ Enigmatic, but what else would one expect from Beckett? Essentially, I perceive prayer as a form of homage or ‘recognition’ - the other word used by Beckett.