Looking Up collects more than a decade of new poems by Dave Smith. These include reflections upon events, animals, and people who prove to have a salutary significance to this poet, now approaching his eightieth year. He ponders the substantial changes wrought by retirement, which brings no expectations, no obligations, no role beyond what one has left, which prompts the question, What will you do now? Both the question and its answers are the subject of Looking Up, as Smith gives us poems as acts of attention, raptures, comedies, sardonic narratives, vignettes of grief and joy whose testimony shows that love is surely our core reality.

Dave Smith lives with his wife, Deloras, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, he has won two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, a Lyndhurst Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio, and the Virginia Poetry Prize. He retired from Louisiana State University as Boyd Professor of English, then from Johns Hopkins University as Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry.