River Ghosts by Merril D. Smith

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Review by Jen Feroze

As you might expect from the title, this is a collection that dances and weaves with ghosts. What you perhaps might not expect is the way it not only carries us back into the past—a mother’s laughter heard in dreams; the polished mahogany of an old antiques shop; a hand-print left shimmering on a wall from long ago—but it also takes us to the realm of the almost and the if. 

Smith uses rhyme and refrains mixed with short, staccato line breaks that serve to keep us breathless and questioning. In poems that soar along the shore line, among the trees and even into space, we are always gently reminded of our smallness in the face of history and the whole great glittering universe.

The personal is interwoven with the historical and the mythical. But whether we’re among the scents of a childhood kitchen ( “… I can still smell the apricots and / nuts / though I was never there”), uncovering a jawbone that’s hundreds of thousands of years old (“Not living / no longer here, / yet not completely gone”), or following an ancient seafarer as he sets a course for home (“He was called Odysseus, / but he was every sailor, every wanderer”), everything is tied together by a sense of longing, the power of dreams, and of wanting to leave a mark, however small.

In a book so thronged with ghosts, it would be easy to slip into the maudlin or eerie, but Smith remains resolutely hopeful. River Ghosts is a gentle read that embraces what is, was and might be. In the face of grief or sadness, we are reminded to look up and see “everything luminous, electric / connected / alive.”

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Merril D. Smith is a historian and poet. Her poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies including Black Bough Poetry, The Storms, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fevers of the Mind. She and her husband live in southern New Jersey near the Delaware River, and she’s working on a new collection.