Heaven and Nature's three sections bring together the natural world, the transcendent world of human eros in love and art, and the contradictory beauty in our mortality. The poems, each in their way, look for what is truly paradisal in our experience, what manifests for us that feeling of "heaven on earth." Part One, "Wild Belonging," constructs a natural year's cycle from spring to winter with its birds, insects, and plants observed near my home river, the Kinnickinnic in western Wisconsin. Part Two, "Stay," is elegiac, celebrating the transitory lives we may mourn, from the public (Jack Kerouac and Rachel Carson are two) to those personal friends held in memory. These poems also memorialize vivid moments of personal history. Part Three, "Heart Jukebox," veers away from the elegiac to our direct experience of the "magnificent here and now." Artists and musicians are celebrated in this group, inspirations as varied as a rural sculptor, a young bluegrass band, a foreign film star, and the Beatles. A handful of poems of mature love conclude this section and the book. This book establishes a steady current of joy in spite of the dissonances of our lives in a time when we all may be asking what of our present world is worth preserving. This selection of poems can point to a partial answer to that question.
Thomas R. Smith is author of ten previous books of poems, Keeping the Star (New Rivers Press, 1988), Horse of Earth (Holy Cow! Press, 1994), The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), Winter Hours (Red Dragonfly Press, 2005), Waking Before Dawn (Red Dragonfly Press, 2007), The Foot of the Rainbow (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010), The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015), Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2018), Storm Island (Red Dragonfly Press, 2020) and Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications, 2022).. He has also edited several books, most recently The Garden Entrusted to Me: Essays on Poetry and the Writing Life by Robert Bly (White Pine Press, 2026). His prose work, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival, came out from Red Dragonfly Press in 2022. He teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and posts poems and essays on his website at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.
"Reading Thomas Smith is to be led on a walk through the natural world of shadow and light to face the complexity of being human. His are poems of the earth's wild heart, its searing mysteries, its hollows and its species. In poems of music and memory, dislocation and home, we circle toward and away from our centers. Whether he's describing a dogwood or a little green heron, a humble moment of meeting, or being a student of wrens, the world seems richer—because the immediate and the eternal are only a breath away. Thomas Smith is dedicated to keeping alive poetry's big questions of transcendence, of beauty, mystery, consolation, terror, memory, shadow, and music, all connected in the glow of a spiritual life." — Mary Kay Rummel, author of Little River of Amazements
"Thomas R. Smith is a John Clare for our time, hymning nature's 'wild belonging' in the smallest wild seed, the glory of the vagrant's heart, the heart-breaking deaths of friends, lost and found loves, and always the leap of music in life and poems. What a gift, this lover of this world, in age still loving and unafraid." — James P. Lenfestey, author of Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements
"If you look through the right lens, heaven's here, underfoot, ever present—and these poems provide that lens, not by denial of the degenerate chaos of modern life, but by attention to the arresting privilege of being alive, and of being remembered beyond. Smith knows how to find, kindle, and offer emblems of paradise at hand. The book find roots in grief's lament for friends, and grows winsome gratitude from there. Facing darkness, Smith sings a furious defiance, as his poems keep finding the fretted light of heaven here, and here." — Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change
