Steven Ross Smith | fluttertongue 4: Adagio for the Pressured Surround | metropolis

fluttertongue 4 : Adagio for the Pressured Surround

Steven Ross Smith

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This book features poetry at its most eloquent. In this long poem, Smith imagistically evokes birds and plants, physical torture, and human relationships as he delves into the meaning of words and ponders language itself. In this sometimes personal, sometimes documentary, work Smith references a wide range of subjects, including science, fishing, and other poets and artists — Canadian and international. Themes that run throughout the book include death, food, and Smith’s relationships with his father and his son. This sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, poetic work explores the possibilities and nuances of language, and seeks to find a form of expression outside of free verse and prose, with a meditative pace. Smith’s tendency to dart in and out of ideas and concepts is delicately balanced by echoes and recurrences, and his quest to explore and expand, for himself, the possibilities of poetry.

“…so packed with detail, conjecture, allusion, beauty, worry, and fear — the pressured surround — that as one sentence invites recognition and even empathy, the next interrupts the reader from following the dark line Smith attempts to take on his family’s mortality.” — Bill Robertson, The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Saturday, May 26, 2007.

“With fluttertongue 4, Ross Smith allows phrases to rub up against each other, fragments of conversations around a room, all building into a crescendo of illness and pain.” — Derek Beaulieu, Alberta View, June 2007.

Steven Ross Smith began writing and publishing as Steven Smith in the early ’70s. In 1971 he saw and heard the (Four) Horsemen (sound and performance poetry ensemble – bpNichol, Steven McCaffery, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton) perform. This was a watershed event. Following, he met the members of that group and began to explore sound poetry, notably in a workshop with McCaffery. Smith soon began to hang out with other Toronto writers, inside and outside an energy ‘cluster’. Among these writers were Richard Truhlar, Michael Dean, David Penhale and Brian Dedora. By the mid-seventies Smith also became friends with bpNichol, and later with Paul Dutton. The influence of this (informal) ‘Toronto school’ set in, and an interest in innovative poetics took hold. In 1975 Smith, along with Truhlar, Dean and Penhale, formed Owen Sound, a group dedicated to sound and performance poetry, and collaborative composition. Among their influences were The Horsemen, Sean OHuigin, Bob Cobbing, and other sound poets…Please read more on this here…