1988, (Sono Nis):
ISBN-10: 1550390082
ISBN-13: 978-1550390087

“Ron Smith began writing A Buddha Named Baudelaire when he was student at Leeds University. Eighteen years later in Lantzville, British Columbia, an inspiration of poetry has reached its maturity. This is an astonishing poem that flows like magic through a Mediterranean dreamscape. A poem written by a Canadian that owes its life to the phases of French literature. It is not about being a homage to Baudelaire any more that to Paul Eluard, or Robert Desnos. A Buddha Named Baudelaire dwells in the eternal cycle of love and its assassin. It moves from white sand to snow in the intimate silence shared by lovers. The poem is a psychic narrative about the struggle of wills. It is the chess game of the spirit. A poem that plunges into an internal landscape and makes its way through the labyrinth like a lantern. A Buddha Named Baudelaire is a masterpiece of lyrical intelligence.”

–Allan Safarik

“Ron Smith writes the poem of the assassination of spent forms of poetic logic and perception. A Buddha Named Baudelaire names us into a new direction in contemporary poetry. We pass through the gates of knowing renewed by the intuitions, linguistic and erotic, that inhere in the body’s dream. We read the poem with our five senses. Or is it six?”

–Robert Kroetsch

“A stylish prose poem, redolent of the bard honoured in its title, A Buddha Named Baudelaire is a book as tightly-structured as the French aesthetics it admires. There’s exceptional craft here: Smith knows his turf….it is strong work; the introductory images are rapturous; its plot and fin d siècle lassitude echo the exacting cinematic lens of Robbe-Grillet or Duras.”

–Trevor Carolan, The Vancouver Sun, June 10, 1989

“For me, Ron Smith’s A Buddha Named Baudelaire is the most engaging. After setting its tone with quotations from Rimbaud, Char, and Bataille, this often surrealistic prose-poem leas the reader through he labyrinth of a developing relationship between the speaker and a ‘beloved,’ which can be both a human lover and the speaker’s poetic art, as suggested by the phrase “White sheets, white bodies, white paper” with which the book opens and closes. Soon the relationship assumes the studied caution of a game of chess, the pieces struggling to preserve themselves within their squarely defined isolation, with the ‘walls” of “this grotesque geometry.” It is only through escape and “assassination” that the speaker is able to move beyond the square (conventionalized) walls to accept and be accepted by the ‘beloved’ in “the holy grace of moonlight.” The theme is the necessary death of the old, self-centred “self,” or literary convention (“We embrace only when we deny that we belong to our own longing.”) and the resurrection into a new vision of the mystery of the ‘other’ (“Yet never has your skin appeared so soft and white. A cool nakedness.”). It is the theme one finds in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” and in Martin Buber’s shift from the ‘I-It’ to the ‘I-Thou’ relationship.

Smith’s language and surrealistic imagery evoke remarkably the steep terror of isolation and vulnerability as well as the final joy and repose of confident mutuality. The freedom of his ‘broke’ form allows him to shift from the prosaic (“We rise when it’s late and the night air cools our kitchen above the front stairs of the apartment house where we live”) to the poetic (“The night is as quiet as bones”) within a short paragraph and with great effectiveness.”

–William Latta, Canadian Literature, 1991