The Dark Indigo Current: Poems - Softcover

Smith, Thomas R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930100662 ISBN 13: 9780930100667

Publisher: Holy Cow! Press, 2000

Synopsis

Housewarming

In my dream I was the first to arrive
at the old home from church. Wind
and night had forced through the cracks.
I pushed inside, turned on lamps,
lit a fire in the stove. Frozen oak
logs stung my fingers; it was good
pain, my hands reddening on the icy
broom-handle as I swept away snow.
On Christmas eve, I prepared a warm
place for my mother and father, sister
and brothers, grandparents, all my relatives,
none dead, none missing, none angry
with another, all coming through the woods.

About this title

From Booklist

Robert Bly's best recent poems concern his father's decline and death. Smith, who edited a sixty-fifth-birthday festschrift for Bly, follows honorably in Bly's footsteps in the 11-poem sequence at the heart of this collection. In those poems that proceed from "the long-distance call, the weeping, / the hurried packing, the dusk departure" upon hearing of the final illness to the family gathering "on our first / Mother's Day without my father," clear-eyed reportage and deft imagery--as in "The Nursing Home," "where bird-like spirits do nothing but peck / away, peck away the shell of life" --combine with the unrhymed, unmetered, but regular stanzas to make the sequence moving, dignified, and utterly unpretentious. Many poems in the sections before and after the sequence are also elegiac, recalling memories and dreams of Smith's father and elderly relatives and friends, and they are distinguished by similar warmth and dignity. In the last section, Smith remains reflective, but life and love continue, lusciously in "The Lost Music," which sounds mournful but is actually sexy. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0930100662
• ISBN 13: 9780930100667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96