"To the degree that poems can help America begin to heal its self-imposed estrangement from the land, these are the poems."

- J .D. Whitney, author of Grandmother Says, All My Relations, and Sweeping The Broom Shorter

"Nearer to its dawn, the work of poetry was likened to that of the plow. Verse meant, truly, turning: just as at the end of each row, at the end of each line, a return to work what's next. In Ancestral, Dan Smith employs the tools of memory, imagination, and feeling to transform his lifetime of farming-its joys and emergencies, its difficulties and wonders-into a bounty of nourishment and grace. Doing so, he turns the mystery of his life into an offering from poetry's vast estate: its, his, and now our shared privacy. Reader, partake."

- Mike Theune, Robert Harrington Professor of English and Writing Program Director, Illinois Wesleyan University, author of Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns

"As a dairy farmer Dan Smith was a prisoner of nature's inescapability. As a poet he is a chronicler of this inescapability. In his newest book of poetry, the farm has been transmuted into a Theater of the Human where we watch the heart and the hurt play their roles upon the stage. In these quiet and often longing-filled dramas, the poet records the plainsong of those who wish they could hold on to what is no longer now. These poems labor to keep the "never again," present and available to the heart. These are the main crop on Dan Smith's poetic farm. Bringing in the sheaves of the human."

- Ed Janus, author of Creating Dairyland

"Daniel Smith's poems contain a certain quietness while honoring the density of the farming life and the voices of those within it and bring to mind Tao Chi'en, great grandfather of modern Chinese poetry, farming, and writing. These poems carry the continuance of the poetic tradition from the deep past, from early Neolithic farmers, down to us inundated with computers, neon, and chrome."

- Roger Dunsmore, author of On the Chinese Wall: New and Selected Poems