The title of Ron Smith's new collection comes from Yeats's observation that creators "must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes." The poems in The Humility of the Brutes move beyond Yeats's journey, using precise language and memorable phrasing to push through skepticism and guide us toward the mystical as we struggle to understand our past and our present.

Ron Smith is the author and editor of numerous books, including the award-winning Elf the Eagle and The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke. An excerpt from this book was translated into eighteen languages by Reader's Digest and published in over twenty-two countries. In 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from U.B.C. and in 2005 he was the inaugural Fulbright Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Elf's Family Tree is the sequel to his earlier illustrated children's book. He lives with his wife, the writer Patricia Jean Smith, in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island where he daily searches the sky for eagles in full flight.