The World Below the Window: Poems 1937-1997 (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

"Throughout this summary of a formidable career, Smith's images reveal the inescapability of memory, testifying to its enduring capacity to affirm the power of the imagination." -- Publishers Weekly

"The World below the Window... provides a welcome and generous retrospective of Smith's 'adult' work, which from its beginning has been defined by a passionate and deeply informed commitment to traditional rhymed metrical-stanzaic forms... That Smith has written poems replete with rhythm, rhyme, wit, and melody... is cause for celebration, homage, and gratitude." -- Elizabeth Frank, The Atlantic Monthly

"The World below the Window: Poems 1937-1997 offers work by a very serious poet indeed. Serious, but not ponderous, never pretentious. Smith's career has been devoted to the poetry of ordinary events, deep feelings, and clarity. His touch is light and bittersweet; he plays the black keeys adroitly without neglecting the call of mundane joys... we would be diminished without the music and melancholy of such sweet lines." -- Fredric Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal

"This fine collection of poems written from 1937 to 1997 is a carefully selected sampling of his highly original and varied art... These are fine poems from an American master and deserve a place in any library." -- Library Journal

This selection of William Jay Smith's work of sixty years covers the entire career of one of America's acknowledged poetic masters. It moves from the dark pre-war lyrics (Quail in Autumn) to the powerful long-lined free verse of the 1960s (The Tin Can). Here are memorable WWII lyrics (Dark Valentine) and masterful light verse (The Tall Poets), displaying the wit that enlivens all of Smith's work. Previously uncollected poems range from a haunting delineation of the ironies of age in "The Shipwreck" to the dramatic intensity of The Cherokee Lottery, which deals with the forced removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi.

Praise for William Jay Smith:

"A most gifted and original poet... One of the very few who cannot be confused with anybody else." -- Richard Wilbur

"William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and The Cherokee Lottery is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable." -- Harold Bloom

"His best poems are unlike anything else in contemporary American literature... Although often based on realistic situations, Smith's compressed, formal lyrics develop language musically in a way which summons an intricate, dreamlike set of images and associations." -- Dana Gioia

"William Jay Smith has given us many of the truest and purest poems an American has written: the most resonantly musical, the most magical." -- X. J. Kennedy