Ron Smith has long been a key figure in the West Coast literary scene, and there are many of us, readers and writers, who feel indebted to him for the work he has done over the years at Oolichan Press, publishing poetry and fiction with fine editorial taste and visual elegance. A recent Oolichan poetry offering, for example, is Circus Dogs ($7.95) by Tommy Douglas (not the late politician), a whimsical, surrealistic collection of bizarre encounters and strange juxtapositions.

After a long silence as a poet, Ron Smith has now published A Buddha Named Baudelaire ($7.95) with Sono Nis Press rather than with his own Oolichan. If your taste runs to decadent writing and mine does you will like this book.

Ron Smith offers the kind of prose poems which Baudelaire also loved to write, and there is in his work the same sense of the mysterious correspondences of existence, and the same awareness of the visible world existing in all its epiphanous glory, that distinguish the great French poets from Baudelaire d Gautier down to Rimbaud, and which Smith admirably celebrates without. imitating.

A Buddha Named Baudelaire is a fine meditational structure that has been so long in the making that it seems to concentrate the essence of the writer's life and thought into a tight cluster of hard and gemlike flames.

-- by George Woodcock, BCBW, 1989