New Irish Poetry Urgently Needed … Stephen James Smith answers the call!
– Christy Moore
Stephen James Smith is a writer gifted with empathy, passion and the rare mastery required to transmute emotion into art. I’ve seen him recite his poetry on a suburban Chicago street to a rapt audience of cops and homeless people for the sheer joy of sharing words. His poems are crafted with care, with great skill, and most importantly, with love.
– Donal Ryan
Here are poems fuelled by the raw urgency of language leaping to meet the world – and here, too, are poems of a tender heart, always willing to reach out, to try to understand. Stephen James Smith is a poet of uncommon energy, utterly alive to the here and now.
– Paula Meehan
Passionate, witty, just plain great; this man’s voice hops right off the page.
– Roddy Doyle
Steve’s poems thrill me, don’t stop Steve. Steve don’t stop!
– Pat Ingoldsby
For anyone who has ever seen Stephen James Smith perform his work live it will come as no surprise to know that Fear Not is a big-hearted and generous collection of poems. In it the writer reports back to us from the frontiers of his own life and the world at large in an engagingly direct and unflinching fashion. He is there as a presence in every poem inviting the reader directly into his emotional and physical world. Stephen James Smith ignores trends or fashions and writes his own poems about his world in his own original and inimitable way.
– Sarah Clancy
Stephen James Smith is a poet whose sympathies lie with ‘the addicted and the convicted’, often responding to what he finds on life’s margins. His sharp-edged forceful language derives from his gifts as a performance poet and his fearlessness in looking into the eye of his subject matter. His poems get their charge, as well as their shape and substance, from his use of demotic rhythms, the vividness of his vernacular and his emotional directness – in the midst of the toughness of his work, he also knows where to find the tender spot.
– Gerard Smyth
Stephen James Smith is a ball of hydrogen gas that should be pumped into every household across the land. He knocks seven shades of shite out of all the usual ‘birds and bees, whey and cheese’ nonsense you find at poetry readings.
– Jinx Lennon