Heroin: And Other Poems - Hardcover

Smith, Charlie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393049973 ISBN 13: 9780393049978

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of new poems by the author of Before and After explores themes of desire and lost love, using heroin as a metaphor for both in the title poem.

About this title

About the Author

Charlie Smith is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Before and After. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Despite the gimmickiness of its title, Smith's latest book is less about smack than about the kind of person who turns to poetry compulsively, and who, having survived addiction, debates whether poetry's function is to intoxicate or to sober up writer and reader. Smith's search for "some way of putting things that captures/ something otherwise unendurable" leads him to pepper colorfully self-loathing confessionalism (the most dominant mode here) with highly charged metaphoric evocations of "the terrible thoughts/ coming out of the woods like old men in gray suits" and an obsession with the nature of change. "Honesty" is a slow, sober, short-lined meditation on the difficulties of apprehending, articulating and acting on simmering dilemmas. In catalogue poems like "Beds," "As for Trees," "Moon, Moon," and "Beautyworks," Smith forgoes investigations into the bottomless pit of subjectivity to celebrate the intoxicating possibilities of trying to get it all down. While the attempt to affirm a present often relies too heavily on the vatic, in "Beautyworks" Smith finds a winning tonal synthesis: "beauty's like this,/ a lingerer at parties,/ last to get the taste of love out of its mouth,/ a friend locked up for his own good..../ the endless variety of the natural world/ always on the other side of consciousness, no way... this is beauty.../ to understand a thing about itA." Sympathetic character studies, such as "A Near Relation" and "Indians Driving Pickup Trucks" and the narrative of his grandfather in "Originations," reveal the Southern, rural roots of Smith's speaker. That Smith can also write well in a neo-Ashberian urban sophisticate mode (especially in "East End" and "At This Hour") gives this winning fifth collection further range and perspective. (Sept.)
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Smith is wearier than Kirby and Louis, and probably depressive, as well. He writes with a certain amused and disgusted nostalgia about two defunct marriages, heroin addiction during the first, and alienation from friends and family--sometimes extraordinarily vividly, as in "Heroin" or "I Try to Remember I Am Dying," and sometimes, admittedly, tiresomely. Balancing such bleak poems are others that express his sense of beauty and transcendence, especially the catalog poems "Flowers of Manhattan," "Beds," and "As for Trees." Smith is genuinely if casually philosophical, too, arguing poignantly with Schopenhauer in "The World as Will and Representation": "'The world is my representation,' he says. / I want to be comforted." If some poems career into mawkishness and self-pity, the strong ones are lyrical personal poetry of a high order. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393049973
• ISBN 13: 9780393049978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104