Duende, Smith’s second collection, suffers the most overtly from these unfocused sympathies which can never quite coalesce into fully-realized art. What plagues her earlier efforts instead is a lack of purpose in the language. For Smith, though, the problem isn’t a matter of artistic self-absorption there’s real compassion and imagination for the people she puts into her poems, whether or not she knows them personally. This same fault could be attributed to any number of poets, especially at the beginning of their careers, when any life other than one’s own is an occasion for larger questions at best, an abstraction at worst. Smith can get herself into trouble, on the other hand, when her attention strays too far from her own experience. Everything seems at first far away, then immediately close by-which is the experience of grief, reified in the poem.

The perspective’s nearly simultaneous expansion (“I know you are far, infinitely far from us”) and magnification (“a frenzy of ants”) is a typical gesture from Smith, though performed so subtly here and so well that one feels, while reading these lines, a smooth acceleration of vision similar to the last few minutes on an airplane as it descends to the runway. The language here-both the diction and syntax-is plain, direct, and as a result, powerful. Wanting to help, to pick up the crumb and put it downĬlose to their hill, seeing their purpose that clearly In the way one of us might pause a moment to watch a frenzy of ants, I know you are far, infinitely far from us. Walking up my steps in the dark, digging for the mail and my keys, The first is a personally elegiac mode, the second a broader-reaching sympathy for marginalized voices that are usually unheard or omitted from the record.Īs is the case with most young poets, Smith’s earlier poems are at their best in the more personal mode, as she is here in this moving elegy for her mother found in The Body’s Question, her first book: Reading it, I was impressed by how immediately Smith seemed to locate the two modes of writing that would sustain her to this point.

Smith has given her readers a generous selection of poems from her previous four books as well as eighteen new poems.

In Such Color, her newest collection of poetry, Tracy K.

Tracy k smith poems life on mars