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Brightwood,
R.T. Smith’s eighth book of poetry, continues his tradition of poetic
excellence steeped in the musicality and regionalism of his native
southland. While the locales and subject matter of the poems could be
easily labeled as “southern,” what refuses to be categorized is Smith’s
effortless use of sound and language to portray the status of the human
condition.
The title poem is an excellent illustration of the attention to tactile
details interwoven with precise sonic complexities that serve to ground all
of Smith’s poems, while at the same giving them and their subject a density
that pays homage to reality and experience.
- The
saw blade will go slowly
- into
the limb’s center where sap
- has
ambered the timber, whether
- it
be holly, fir or cedar, and maple’s
-
grain is the gift
of candor
-
filled with
cambered light
-
and the patience
of a bird-knit
-
forest…
In this first sentence alone the tension and contrast created between the
word choice and musicality of the individual lines and line-breaks mirrors
perfectly the loving construction of the fiddle that is the subject matter
of the poem.
- …You
rasp and sand
-
for the curve of
muscle, the feel
-
of bone, then
smoke and varnish
-
for the whiskey
sheen…
This same painstaking construction is obvious in each of Smith’s poem and
becomes a metaphor not only for life, but for his writing as well.
This mixing of mediums, the mundane and ethereal, is a hallmark of Smith’s
poems as he moves from form to form and from subject to subject. In this
same way the poem “Downy,” a simple description of a bird feeder and
woodpecker, takes on near mythic proportions:
-
…the black seeds
-
of his eyes quick
with trepidation,
-
as if he almost
knows
-
his savoring the
treat instead
-
of pecking the
eave’s cedar
-
for insects
invites hungrier
-
creature to see
him
-
aptly graphed, his
tweed wings
-
mapped on the
skeletal mesh
-
so predators can
detect him,
-
as if, in fact
he’s testing the world’s
-
sleepy mercy, as
he crawls,
-
back-lit in blue,
his scarlet skull
-
cap offering on
the grid
-
a target some
hunters—be they
-
hawk or
human—might in quiet
-
appreciation call
a fatal gift.
-
- The final two
lines move the poem beyond a simple lyrical description and into the
bittersweet realm of human experience, a realm all too familiar to
Smith’s work.
-
- The forms the
poems take are as varied as the author’s own artistic endeavors and
actual subject matter. In the poem titled “Directly,” Smith offers the
reader a southern etymological lesson on the same word:
-
-
“I’ll get to it
directly,” she’d say, meaning
-
soon, meaning,
when I can, meaning, not
-
yet, be patient,
the world don’t turn upon
-
your every need
and whim…
-
- It is in these
voiced recollections, that blur the lines between lyric, dramatic and
narrative poetry, that Smith seems perhaps most comfortable.
-
- …Or
“the dogs
- will
be back home directly, I reckon,”
- “the
preacher will be finished,” “your daddy
- will
see to you,” supper will be laid out”—
- all
“directly,” which never meant the straight
- line
between two surveyor’s points or
- an
arrow’s flight, but rather, by the curve,
- the
indirect, the arc of life and breath…
And that is where the power of this brand of poetry, poems like “Rimfire,
Windage, the Jimmy Nichols Breath,” “Voices, Traces, the Whip-poor-will’s
Plea,” and “Queen City, Skins,” lies: in the roundabout journey of
experience, for both the poet and the reader.
-
William Ashley Johnson
- Southern Scribe
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-
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2004, Southern Scribe Reviews, All Rights Reserved |
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