Wade in the Water

February 15, 2018

"I feel ashamed, finally,/ Of our magnificent paved roads,/ Our bridges slung with steel.../ Everything enhanced, rehearsed," writes Pulitzer Prize winner Smith (Life on Mars), our current poet laureate, reminding us that the comfortable but artificial world we've constructed only distracts us from the real: "the cold, the pitiless, the bleak." Throughout her fourth collection, Smith centers attention on the troubled infrastructure of social, political, and environmental realities--contemporary and historical--that underlie and often undermine the "desolate luxury" of an unjust, profit-driven society that divides the haves from the have-nots. Though Smith is not afraid to point fingers ("Those awful, awful men. The ones/ Whose wealth is a kind of filth"), she accepts the personal and collective guilt borne by those who benefit, even modestly, from inequality. Most effectively, in a series of documentary poems incorporating letters by African American enlistees in the Civil War, she restores the lost voices of its victims. VERDICT Technically accomplished and precisely attuned to our current cultural climate, Smith, like William Butler Yeats, once again demonstrates how an engaged, activist poetry need not forgo lyricism, compassion, and complexity to be effective. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/17.]--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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Starred review from March 19, 2018
History is in a hurry,” writes Smith in her first collection since the Pulitzer-winning Life on Mars, and these lyrical meditations on class, environmental threat, and America’s bloody heritage prove that the current U.S. poet laureate is plenty capable of keeping up with that “ship forever setting sail.” Readers familiar with Smith’s work will feel at home in “this dark where the earth floats.” Some poems inhabit a more boldly theological space than does previous work, yet Smith’s sense of the numinous stays appealingly grounded, as when she describes the “everlasting self” as “Gathered, shed, spread, then/ Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love/ From a lifetime ago, and mud/ A dog has tracked across the floor.” Whether presenting a sardonic erasure of the Declaration of Independence or dramatizing the correspondence between black Civil War soldiers and their wives, Smith nimbly balances lyricism and direct speech. In “Annunciation,” she boldly states, “I’ve turned old. I ache most/ To be confronted by the real,/ the pitiless, the bleak.” But a wry playfulness leavens her weightier concerns, and she leaves a small window open on her private self: “Flying home, I snuck a wedge of brie, and wept/ Through a movie starring Angelina Jolie.” Smith remains a master whose technical skill enhances her emotional facilities, one ever able to leave readers “feeling pierced suddenly/ By pillars of heavy light.”

Starred review from March 15, 2018
Poetry requires acts of exquisite selection and distillation that Smith, poet laureate of the United States, performs with virtuosity and passion throughout her profoundly affecting fourth collection. Smith begins with ravishing lyrics of earthy spirituality. Two angels appear in a motel room: Grizzled, / in leather biker gear. In Hill Country, the rolling cadence traces the journey of God himself across rising and falling terrain in a jeep with the windows down. The title poem subtly captures the struggle between belief in a higher love and the cruel reality of the old South. Smith then illuminates personal perspectives on the Civil War in artistic feats of erasure and extraction, including a long poem composed of judiciously selected excerpts from letters to President Lincoln by black soldiers and their mothers and wives, heartrending testimony to the dire deprivation of those who risked their lives for the Union, yet were denied the most fundamental compensation. Smith is equally arresting in poems about contemporary injustices, including Watershed, a stunning response to the consequences of a corporation's unconscionable dumping of carcinogenic chemical waste. The sacred and the malevolent are astutely juxtaposed in this beautifully formed, deeply delving, and caring volume.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)