Smoke Encrypted Whispers showcases Samuel Wagan Watson’s imaginative brilliance and exceptional poetic skills. In this book, which also includes work from three previous collections, his poems pulse with the language and images of a mangrove-lined river city, the beckoning highway, the just-glimpsed muse, the tug of childhood and restless ancestors. Wagan Watson’s poetry is the work of an artist who speaks to a sense of our common humanity, and to a communal attachment to place. Reading this book is, as Tony Birch points out, ‘like witnessing Bruce Springsteen meet the Dreamtime’ .