Smyth’s poetry has appeared in periodicals including American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Beloit Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Cyphers (Dublin), Kenyon Review, Lyric, Mississippi Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Shenandoah, among others.

His work has also been included in anthologies in the U.S. and England:  Contemporary Religious Poetry, ed. Paul Ramsey (Paulist Press, 1987); Ten American Poets, ed. James Atlas (Carcanet Press, 1973); Contemporary New England Poetry, Vols. I and II, ed. Paul Ruffin (Texas Review Press, 1988); and Vital Signs, ed. Ronald Wallace (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

His poems have received a number of honors, including three annual awards from the Lyric Foundation, the Dillon Memorial Prize (one of Poetry magazine’s annual awards), and a Mount Holyoke College Faculty Fellowship.

Smyth published various books of poetry through small presses:  Native Grass (Windy Row Press, 1972); Shadowed Leaves (Press Porcepic, 1973); Fifty Sonnets (Windy Row Press, 1973); Thistles and Thorns: Abraham and Sarah at Bethel (Abattoir Editions, University of Nebraska at Omaha, illustrated by Barry Moser, 1977); Antibodies (Cedar Creek Press, 1979); The Cardinal Sins: A Bestiary (Pennyroyal Press, illustrated by Barry Moser, 1980).  A longer book, Conversions, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1974.

Several of Smyth’s poems have been set to music by jazz trumpeter and composer John D’earth.

Smyth was a formalist in style, welcoming the structure provided by set forms and the musicality inherent in meter and rhyme.  He worked in many forms:  rondel, sapphic stanzas, ottava rima, villanel, quatrain, sextet, free verse, epigram, and especially the sonnet.  On occasion, he invented forms to meet the needs of his subject matter.  The discipline of his style contrasts with the content of his poetry, which often deals with the chaotic and uncontrollable.

 Smyth frequently wrote about his own experiences, attempting through art to “alchemize” painful episodes into beauty.  But his poetry transcends the merely confessional, due to a generosity of spirit that embraces other individuals, the larger groupings of humanity, and vulnerable creatures. 

His poems are strongly rooted in place, especially the rural New England landscape where he grew up and spent much of his life.