Goodbye, Apostrophe

"Peter Schmitt presents a compelling, responsible, deeply felt and even exalted imagination that knows its way about the various worlds of immediacy, memory, dream, or fantasy, that we all inhabit in one way or another. His range is exemplary and, most persuasively of all, his poems are altogether without pretensions, as if they had been smelted down to draw off any possible impurities. They exhibit, in consequence, the ring of integrity so rare that it deserves the honor of our delight and gratitude." Anthony Hecht , Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
"Peter Schmitt's poems are elegantly simple. Within a straightforward style are subtleties of discovery and recognition. I am delighted by its evident authenticity amid so much current poetry that is self-consciously overelaborated and dishonest. Peter Schmitt takes profundity by surprise, himself surprised, it seems, at what he has found--he had not stalked it. He gives his attention generously to what he observes, to detail as to mass. A real poet." Denise Levertov , Robert Frost Medal-winning poet
"Peter Schmitt is a kind of poet I particularly admire, a kind lately too much in the minority: one who writes lucid poems in precise language about life as it is." Donald Justice , Pulitzer Prize-winning poet