Jump Soul

February 24, 2014
Poet and novelist Smith (Word Comix) opens with a generous offering of new poems before selecting from his seven previous collections. He finds beauty in past addictions and broken marriages, a teeming mesh of impenetrable wordiness, sorrow, and intricately textured environments. Smith explores regret while moving forward with equal abandon: “I’d walk out on myself if I could,” he writes in “Late Days.” His poems work best when stripped of their habit of big-word bravado: “sometimes what passes on from us/ has little to do with what we hoped, but nonetheless/ carries word of who we were and what we found.” Often compared to Charles Wright for his rich descriptions of place, Smith should also be acknowledged for his smart poetic turns—he often ends poems with an open door, an ominous or luminous cadence. “As For Trees” employs lush arboreal images as a loose timeline for the women he has known: “spatters of scarlet in the white, vague yellow musings, blue silk bits, rouged lip skin peeled off and crumpled up.” “Beds” echoes his dynamic movement through life: “nights of delightful smells,/ nights on the river, by the sea, inland nights/ spoken of in hushed voices, nights by the wayside,/ nights come to bed late for no reason.”

Starred review from February 1, 2014

Smith is an Aga Khan Prize-winning author of fiction (Crystal River) and the winner of the National Poetry Series Award for his debut, Red Roads. His sixth collection combines elements of both genres and exemplifies his style. The poems generally have lengthy, proselike (but not prosaic) lines, reminiscent of poetry by Walt Whitman. Their overall subject is the will to survive despite disillusionment. The bleakest poems--e.g., "I Speak to Fewer People"--echo Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, while other, more upbeat works focus on a moment of saving grace; "Dusk Like the Messiah" ends by combining meaning and mystery: "unencumbered tenderness seeps into crevices and conventions where the one speaking, / for just a second looks up from the discourse and goes quiet as he gets it." VERDICT With their long, loose lines, the best poems here rush down the page until they reach their just-right end. They don't run out of energy but instead stop to contemplate what happened and why. In that split second, the words flash their often brilliant message.--C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2014
Prolific Smith, author most recently of the haunting, noirlike novels Men in Miami Hotels (2013) and Three Delays (2010), brings together new and earlier poems in this scintillating collection. In new works, Smith blends his down-home sense of southern intensity with an antiquarian fondness for lost figures: dauphins and ducats, Victor Hugostyle clerics, the gaudy epaulettes of chinaberry trees and crepe myrtles, swimming in mossy cloudbanks of used alyssum. These are fast, brief poems, packed with lavish atmosphere and intricate language, delicacies to savor repeatedly. Equally alluring, the book draws from Smith's seven previous collections of poetry, including the frank and harrowing Heroin and Other Poems (2000), the fervent, tumultuous Before and After (1995), and the brash, passionate The Palms (1993). The retrospective selections consistently strike an emotional human core, like a lump of chalcedony in / your gut. Readers familiar with Smith's audacious style will relish the new work and appreciate the compendium of selected poems. For anyone unfamiliar, this is a necessary starting point into the oeuvre of an unmatched American poet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)