If you like: Citizen: An American Lyric, Lemonade, found poetry, Pulitzer awards.
When Life on Mars was first published, the publishers must have written the press release accepting the Pulitzer as soon as the ink on the book dried. There’s no way they didn’t know that Tracy K. Smith’s book of poetry was a classic in the making.
If it were me, I’d retire at that point.
But since then, Smith has published a memoir, served as Poet Laureate, teaches at Princeton and raises small humans.
Wade in the Water is her first poetry collection since the Pulitzer in 2012. It came out in the spring.
Some of it is what you’d expect from such a contemplative poet:
“Looking into the distance
Blotted out by hills that give way
Sometimes suddenly to silos
Or the teetering barns of a past
That’s gone, but won’t lie down
And let us grieve it.”
-- from Driving to Ottawa
Her poems can be observational, snapshots of moments during travel, people on the street, her own children.
Hedges hum with bees, a picture stares into what once must have seemed the future, someone sings an old blood-deep song.
In struggling strangers, she see the people she loves.
The contemplative stream, though, is broken by a section of found poetry.
It was Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis that started to change my mind on found poetry being more than a gimmick.
But it’s Smith who really blew my mind, right from the beginning, by removing words from the Declaration of Independence, giving new meaning to a document that declares its freedom for some, not all.
I’ve heard there’s a debate over the consequence of the political poem. Can a poem be both a reaction to current events and retain the universality that carries it beyond the moment?
Um, yes.
Smith proves the universality is there because what’s happening in today’s news isn’t new -- it’s a conversation that’s been happening for centuries.
She does that by using the words of real people in the past, the letters that they wrote, from slaveholders to African-American soldiers in the Civil War and their families.
Their lives are history to us now, but they were writing to their present moment, and it carries forward.
It’s a compelling collection, written for the present, but sure to last into the future.
"Wade in the Water" by Tracy K. Smith; Graywolf Press; April 2018.
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