The Way to Come Home is Carolyn Smart's fourth book of poems. It is a collection that ranges from celebrating the rural landscape north of Kingston, Ontario to re-creating the painful last phase of her friend Bronwen Wallace's life in a movin sequence titled "The Sound of the Birds." The volume's opening sequence, "Cape of Storms," views the hatred thriving amid the astonishing physical beauty of South Africa while "The woman is bathing" details a journey to Costa Rica that is a journey into the self. The outward eye is as acute as the inward in this powerful book

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Carolyn Smart has written six previous collections of poetry, including The Way to Come Home (Brick Books, 1993), and Hooked: Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009). Her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001) won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. Smart is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and an editor for the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press; since 1989 she has taught Creative Writing at Queen’s University. She lives with her family in the country north of Kingston.

Carolyn Smart's profile page

" ... There are many tears, many fears in this book. They are brave and calming ones though, and the poems come off that way too. Fear and lusciousness cohabit ... I am glad Carolyn and her poems are alive."--Phil Hall, Books in Canada

"The Way to Come Home is a lush, sensual book, Smart's best yet; proof of a poet who is pushing hard at the limits of her craft."--Letters in Canada

"Smart's ability to invest the ordinary with a compelling beauty is an obvious strength ... Smart's book succeeds fully in its attempt to ally human feeling, whether in Southern Ontario or Spanish America, with the natural world."--Shannon Hengen, Canadian Book Review Annual