“Timely, remarkable, and unforgettable”
“When faced with the daunting task of choosing one winner out of more than 430 manuscripts submitted for the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, what does one look for? A first poem that hooks you and pulls you in—and then poem after poem that refuse to let you stop reading. A mastery of craft. Music. An undulating urgency of tone that leaves no doubt about the emotional impulse that drives the work. A voice that you trust, even when the syntax or the material is difficult. And that material needs to feel relevant, of substance, necessary. Not a Soul but Us is an achievement on every front. Set in rural England during and after the bubonic plague pandemic of 1348–49, this verse novel drives to the heart of what we humans are capable of when boiled down to our very core in the struggle to survive—and how, in more ways than one, it’s not our intelligence or our resiliency but love and the non-human animals that save us. Timely, remarkable, and unforgettable, these eighty-four sonnets are so well crafted that we cease to notice the form, swept away as we are by the current of the story and its song.“
—Meg Kearney, author of All Morning the Crows and The Ice Storm and judge of the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
“An endearing classic”
“Not since A. E. Housman’s 1896 The Shropshire Lad has a poet produced such an endearing classic as Not a Soul but Us, a verse novel in eighty-four rhyming sonnets. Told in spare, authentic language reflecting the Anglo-Saxon world of Medieval Yorkshire, the sequence describes an orphaned boy and his dog who bond to survive, along with their sheep, during and after the bubonic plague. Each sonnet flows into the next with a natural cadence; readers will pause on the masterful couplets. Recounted over a decade, with occasional flashbacks, the story unfolds to reveal the two alone in a landscape of rich pastures, often in perilous weather, guiding their flock. Emerging into manhood, the boy recalls his early days with the pup, and his father’s words: ‘ “Good Lord above,” / he said, “dogs always save the boys they love.” ‘ “
—Paula Deitz, editor of The Hudson Review
“A tour de force”
“Not a Soul but Us is a beautiful, fluently accomplished, and poignant story that vividly plunges us into the confounding, swelling horror of a medieval English plague—even as it celebrates its young hero’s commitment to living. Richard Smith is true to the voice of his shepherd protagonist and the rigors and pleasures of the sonnet form he so stunningly employs, combining a gripping story with the power of the poem to give us a narrative that is at once natural and artful, authentic to its time and immediate to our own. Not a Soul but Us is a tour de force that delights the mind and rouses the heart.”
–David Groff, author of Clay
