Birds of Sympathy: Correspondences

Praise for George Looney & Douglas Smith

“Recently, I watched My Dinner with Andre, a film I haven’t seen in some forty years. Watching it again, I was struck by how the two speakers listen with such care to one another, responding, even when they disagree, with tenderness. That’s what I feel while reading Birds of Sympathy: Correspondences, this conversation-in-poems between George Looney and Douglas Smith. Their interchange, as they probe ‘the mystery / of what it means to be human,’ feels intimate and always human. Smith writes, ‘Every angel carries a miraculous message to us,’ and readers will certainly find the miraculous in Birds of Sympathy. As well as language that, over and over, makes Rilke, and his terrible angels, swoon.”
– John Bradley, author of Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to César Vallejo

“In Birds of Sympathy, poets George Looney and the late Douglas Smith record a yearslong dialogue of love and hurt and grace. It’s a conversation that achieves intimacy and depth seldom reached for, even among lovers, much less friends. ‘We always speak of loss when we speak of love,’ a poem tells us, and it bears Smith’s initials. There’s pain in reading words from one who is lost to another who is left, their correspondence silenced. It’s a bird that comes home to roost when Looney notes that ‘every relationship is terminal,’ a condition that separates us from indifferent angels and is ‘the only thing that makes light possible.’ When Smith closes a poem, ‘Let me know if the light reaches you,’ we feel it has, but it’s the gold, end-of-day kind that rends what it illumines.
– Karen Craigo, former Poet Laureate of Missouri, author of Passing Through Humansville