It’s fashionable these days for towns large and small to name a Poet Laureate. That all started back in Merrie Olde England when kings and officials bestowed the title on a liv ing poet who was assigned to write odes on various state occasions.

Ben Jonson was the first, followed by writers like John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Not all of them were particularly good at the job, including Thomas Shadwell, Colley Cibber or Robert Southey, about whom George Gordon, Lord Byron, wrote: “Southey, Southey cease thy endless song, A bard can chant too often and too long!” These days municipalities are getting into the act and are careful to select the best in the biz, not some poetaster, like C. Day Lewis. A case in point. I remember first seeing my friend Barton Sutter’s picture plastered over the hull of a Duluth city bus and thinking what an apt choice to name him laureate in the area where he taught. The city of St. Paul, I think, waited too long to finally appoint Carol Connolly, now sadly passed to the Poet’s corner in Heaven.

I believe River Falls or maybe even Pierce County should name a laureate. It wouldn’t take them long to find out who would fill the bill. That would be Thomas R. Smith, longtime amanuensis to National Book Award Winner Robert Bly, and also teacher at the Loft Literary Center, poetry reviewer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and author of 10 books of poetry in the past 34 years, including “Keeping the Star,” “Horse of Earth,” “The Dark Indigo,” “Winter Hours,” “Waking Before Dawn,” “The Foot of the Rainbow,” “The Glory,” “Windy Day at Kabekona,” “Storm Island,” as well as editing several prose works like “Air Mail: The Letters of Robert Bly” and “Tomas Transtomer and Writing Poetry on the Side of Nature,” another prose work.

Thomas is out with a new volume that will resonate to thousands of fellow readers, old and new, still suffering under the onus of the pandemic. It’s called “Medicine Year” (Paris Mornings Publishers, $15), a touching love story about the year his beloved wife Krista Spieler suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on Christmas Day 2019, while he battled with prostate cancer just as the pandemic was taking hold. Happily, they’re both recovering in 2022, but not before the poet muses on death and celebrates life in his new book. I’ve never been so touched by poems that strike so close to home.

He’ll be reading at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 16 at the River Falls Public Library (140 Union St.) Here’s an event you shouldn’t miss, if you dearly love someone and/or life itself.

Here’s a taste from the day Krista gets out of the hospital for the first time:

“Was it Emerson who wrote that marriage is an improvement on love? Today, taking your arm and helping you from the car into Noodles & Company after your followup appointment with the cardiologist, I can’t tell you the difference. In a sunny booth I tell you how fine it is to simply see you across a restaurant table again, our first such outing in two months. Fresh again as if for the first time. Thousands of meals I took for granted, my mind absent, not seeing or hearing you.

Maybe nothing will ever be ordinary like that for us again— and maybe that’s a good thing—except what we choose to honor by pretending it so, while knowing the fragile value of our happiness and how in an instant it can turn into something else. Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.