'Municipal Love Poems' is Simon Smith's third collection from Shearsman Books, and is a companion volume to 'Last Morning' (Parlor Press) which appeared in early 2022. Simon Smith's Municipal Love Poems navigates between the intimately personal, and the impersonally public. Everywhere the expression is musical, presented in tight lines, phrases, couplets and tercets - never longer - although several of these poems sustain their intensity over pages. The form is 'micrometer right / to the exact fit'. Smith's question in these poems centres around song - sound, music, voice, tongue - 'how do you make the ordinary language sing?'. The poems are characterised by word play and slippage, where one word suggests the next, where the link is as much anagrammatic as it is imagistic. For Smith the lyric may be 'lyre', but it is also 'liar'. These poems move from the celebratory to the more complex elegiac realm of hauntology. Often the subject matter is 'municipal', and these poems are as likely to name BBC News 24, email, 3G, Apple, Monsanto, Isis, space junk and algorithms, as they are likely to include the pastoral indicators of herons, nightingales and blackbirds, bluebells, clouds, rain and moonlight. This is a dynamic, exciting, and attuned collection of poetry. -Andy Brown In these poems, even as they deny the transcendence of love, hope lies in the small details of everyday life. The isolated lines and short stanzas of a voice with a catch in the throat produce poems and songs where love lies somewhere between a Hallmark card and Baudelaire. Poetry may be the result of inspiration, of taking things in, but, as Simon Smith tells us we also sing when we breathe out into the world. -Ian Davidson