Ken Smith is a poet and prose writer and a former editor of Stand and South West Review. From 1969 to 1973 he lived in the United States, and he continued to be better known in America until the publication of his selected poems, The Poet Reclining, in 1982 reestablished his reputation in England. The Poet Reclining is a testament to Smith's integrity and endurance. A major imaginative enterprise "in the American grain," it had to be sustained against the grain of contemporary English poetry.

Kenneth John Smith was born in Yorkshire, the son of a farm laborer, John Smith, and Millicent Sitch Smith. Harsh conditions and an unyielding temper ensured that his father never kept a job for long. The first of the wanderer figures that haunt Smith's poetry were his own family, moving on at the end of harvest:

       a darker blur on...