Overview

Smooth Appearances is a luminous collection of poetry that invites readers to look beneath the surface of everyday life and discover the mystery, resilience, and wonder hiding in plain sight. In poem after poem, Diane M. Williams explores the beauty and peril of the natural world, the fragile terrain of memory, and the complexities of being human in a constantly shifting landscape. From dogwood-splashed Tennessee hillsides to the wind-scoured plains of Kansas, from childhood scenes in the Deep South to encounters with herons, cicadas, iguanas, and cosmic night skies, these poems move with clarity and emotional depth. With lyrical precision and a spirit both tender and fierce, Williams reveals how nature, art, travel, and personal history intertwine to shape our identities. Themes of womanhood, family, loss, longing, and transformation echo throughout the book, offering readers moments of solace, insight, and revelation. This collection will appeal to readers who love nature poetry, ecopoetry, lyric and narrative verse, travel-inspired writing, and meditative work that blends image, memory, and spiritual inquiry. Williams's voice is at once intimate and expansive-rooted in place yet reaching toward the universal. Smooth Appearances ultimately celebrates the extraordinary within the ordinary, reminding us that every landscape-internal or external-holds a story worth listening to. This is a book for anyone seeking poetry that illuminates the world with compassion, curiosity, and striking sensory detail.

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Reviews

Diane Williams' imaginings in Smooth Appearances search for meaning beneath the surface of the ordinary. Her unexpected observations invite us to the synesthesia of a sunset as organ music and to consider how a globe could be interpreted through a boy's Rubik's cube. The poet's personal experience offers a bold contrast to Mary Oliver's vision of a rural Alabama landscape. She has us ponder the possibility of Thoreau sending Emily Dickinson a Valentine. Her poetic vision presents new insights into history and ancient myths. Where these poems leap, we must follow. Claudia M. Stanek -Beneath Occluded Shine Diane Williams, in Smooth Appearances, writes of the familiar-a tennis racquet, herons, a pot of gumbo, an old mailbox-things gleaned from an acute awareness of everyday life, and of the more exotic-Capri, Provence, the Jeanne D'Arc memorial in Rouen, the Oracle at Delphi-treasures gathered from a life of travel. Poems, such as ""Tennessee Blue,"" charm with their slow unveiling of image after image, while poems of the nature of ""a woman's mind"" urge the reader to take a look at ingrained belief systems and to open the self to starkly different ways of perceiving. Williams' appreciation for the mysteries and joys of everyday life is sifted through her questioning mind to create thought-provoking poems that bring delight to her readers. Connie Jordan Green -Nameless as the Minnows

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