The Way to Come Home

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The Way to Come Home is Carolyn Smart’s fourth book of poems. It is a collection that ranges from celebrating the rural landscape north of Kingston, Ontario to re-creating the painful last phase of her friend Bronwen Wallace’s life in a movin sequence titled “The Sound of the Birds.” The volume’s opening sequence, “Cape of Storms,” views the hatred thriving amid the astonishing physical beauty of South Africa while “The woman is bathing” details a journey to Costa Rica that is a journey into the self. The outward eye is as acute as the inward in this powerful book

AUTHOR

Carolyn Smart

Carolyn Smart was born in England in 1952 and moved to Canada in 1958. She has lived in Ottawa, Toronto, and Winnipeg, and now lives on a farm north of Kingston with her husband and three children.

Reviews

” … There are many tears, many fears in this book. They are brave and calming ones though, and the poems come off that way too. Fear and lusciousness cohabit … I am glad Carolyn and her poems are alive.”–Phil Hall, Books in Canada

“The Way to Come Home is a lush, sensual book, Smart’s best yet; proof of a poet who is pushing hard at the limits of her craft.”–Letters in Canada

“Smart’s ability to invest the ordinary with a compelling beauty is an obvious strength … Smart’s book succeeds fully in its attempt to ally human feeling, whether in Southern Ontario or Spanish America, with the natural world.”–Shannon Hengen, Canadian Book Review Annual