Prayers for the Dead and Other Poems

This is Michael Smith's first collection since his Collected Poems of 2009, and is an elegiac volume. As the author says: "Let me try to define prayer as I am using it here. It is a voice in the head, ours and not ours. It speaks in words we scarcely understand. Unstoppable, unless distracted by our quotidian pursuits. Beckett said it thus: 'All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody is prayer.' Enigmatic, but what else would one expect from Beckett? Essentially, I perceive prayer as a form of homage or 'recognition'-the other word used by Beckett."