Description
Daniel Smith’s ANCESTRAL draws from the thirty years he farmed his family’s dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. With poetry grounded in the rural Midwest, ANCESTRAL explores a family’s deep attachment to the land, the physical work of farming and the emotional disruption one endures when such a life is no longer sustainable. These poems provide a powerful depiction of the changes impacting agriculture and our rural communities.
One need not be or have been a farmer to relate to the universal human stories told in Daniel Smith’s Ancestral, poetry part elegy, part prayer, part reverence for the past with images so rich you’ll want to gather a wrap around you when the snow falls, grasp a glass of water when the drought dust rises in the hot sun. Giving truth to the notion that those who come after us have not forgotten, but instead have worn “down dirt / a straight path from house” to the past, Smith’s poems “point / to what is constant / illuminating / and true.”
Praise for Ancestral
“In these quiet and often longing-filled dramas, the poet records the plainsong of those who wish they could hold on to what is no longer now. These poems labor to keep the ‘never again,’ present and available to the heart. These are the main crop on Dan Smith’s poetic farm. Bringing in the sheaves of the human.”
— Ed Janus, author of Creating Dairyland
Sara Steever –
I was given Ancestral as a gift and thought to read it over a weekend. But I quickly learned I could not turn more than two or three pages at a time because I was so moved by what I read. Perhaps because of my own farm’s story or the life and land I share with my husband, but I found that each poem deserved time for rereading and thought. Ancestral is a beautiful expression of a life’s many loves. In reading, I walked the solemn procession under the arched trees and saw the life’s work sketched by cow trails. And I have never enjoyed a book of poetry this much.