The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 - Softcover

Smith, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807125490 ISBN 13: 9780807125496

Publisher: LSU Press, 2000

Synopsis

In The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970–2000, Dave Smith’s poetry reveals its roots in the elegiac tradition that has marked a southern literature so prominent in the twentieth century. Yet equally visible, now, is the ancestral shadow of the Anglo-Saxon poetry of religious questing and the inner voyaging of dreams. With runic parables of nature and its implacable force, Smith’s narrative style is a gritty, ever realistic presentation of human di-lemmas in a world both familiar to us all and eerily strange. Here the actions of character contest the principles of grace, courage, manliness, and fate for what matters.

Sailing Atlantic waters, exploring domestic relationships, or plumbing memory for a personal and cultural identity, Smith dramatizes a vision of obligations we honor and, often enough, also fail, moments in which we may touch our origins and what philosopher William James called “felt facts.” These are the wellsprings of beauty and happiness and freedom, ambitions of all poetry. The twenty-one new poems in The Wick of Memory show Dave Smith turning to work that is surprisingly autumnal. Yet entering the new millennium, Smith is a poet restless as ever in formal practices. If this book chronicles a soul’s journey, it also tears life roughly against its inevitable limits.

Whether he writes of the music of the Platters, pulling a pig’s tail, children racing wheelchairs, an itinerant black saxophonist hassled by the police, broken romance, or the lure of boats and water, Smith shows behind everything the reality of love. It lasts. It is what glues together the pieces of our lives that seem to float so terribly and easily away. The Wick of Memory, Dave Smith’s record of that vision, is a poetry that registers in every ebb and flow the power of continuous passion.

About this title

About the Author

Dave Smith, department chair of the Hopkins Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University and former coeditor of The Southern Review, is the author of numerous collections of poetry, fiction, criticism, and anthologies. He has won fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation.

From Publishers Weekly

After 17 collections--including two previous new and selecteds--one would expect the indefatigable Smith to settle down some, but not so. Proceeding chronologically (which here means back-to-front), one finds that a formal elegance and a maritime musical panache akin to early Lowell mark Smith's early work most clearly, whether meditating on oyster boats where "the currents carried/ cloisters of murk,/ miracles that bloom/ luminous and unseen, sweet things to be/ brought up, bejeweled, culled from husks" or simply capturing "the big-jawed Bluefish, ravenous, sleek muscle slamming,/ convoys rank after rank, wheeling through flume and flute of blood." Poems rooted to the South show a delighted attention to its quirks and an interest in familial progressions. When Smith, however, abandons this often patriarchal legacy and opts for a more confessional tone, his music begins to unravel, giving way to prosaic speech ("It/ might help to say how in my head/ she slumps helplessly, my arms/ don't know what to do with her") and bathetic doggerel ("and your voice goes/ spattering against my fingers like ache's shredding/ that couldn't be held back any longer"). Fortunately, "The Holy Mother of Connecticut Avenue" kicks off the book with a mortal vengeance--"death's hot shit piled up around us, a stinking smoke/ coiled like BO out of skinless wires, on floorboards licked,/ as if all we wanted was flame-touched at last"--and the wick catches anew. While not the major achievement a third try at a new and selected might suggest, there is enough energy here to merit a look. (Apr.)

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807125490
• ISBN 13: 9780807125496
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280