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' .