Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back Houstonian poet Tamara Nicholl-Smith with two surrealist poems exploring the border between dreams and spirituality. The Collectors envisions angelic beings who are listeners, postmen, and historians of our stories. “Radiant librarians skim/ the pages of returned books/ for pencil underlines, circles, and notes/ whispered in margins—/ the unseen books within books:/ the quiet dialogue with the far away and the dead.”
“The Somnambulist” is about an angelic dream experience while sleepwalking. “I hear a choir/ of wings, at first/ faint and distant./ The sound grows louder/ and more distinct,/ until I stand/ enthralled at its/ center.” Drawn out of normal patterns of night and day and tired during waking hours, she finds herself attuned to a still, small voice heralding change, not oppression: “this is chrysalis, not capture.”
Carl Jung wrote, “One who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes.” The deeper into our inner world we go, the more we see that what is within is also without, that archetypes which we encounter in our dreams are encountered by others in theirs, with similar and differing resonance and meaning. Whether this is projection or the movement of the divine or both meeting one another is a mystery. It is a rich thing to look for echoes and synchronicities in poetry, especially when the imagery is as breathtakingly beautiful as Tamara’s. Her gentle alliterative music is steeped in wonder, awe, and an earnestness that is deeply refreshing.
Read Tamara’s evocative poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith was a finalist for the 2025–2027 Houston Poet Laureate and holds an MFA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). She’s been known to lure muses out of hiding, teach poets to borrow the voices of myth and fiction, and make a line of verse sing—all in her regular virtual workshops for Catholic Literary Arts. An editor for The Better Part, launching in 2026, her poetry has turned up on city bus panels, a parking meter, radio airwaves, a spoken-word, techno-classical piano fusion album, and in journals and anthologies including America, Ekstasis, The Examined Life Journal, New Verse Review, and two Mutabilis Press collections. She likes puns and enjoys her bourbon neat. Visit her at tamaranichollsmith.com