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Such Color: New and Selected Poems
“Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.� � Vogue
Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such New and Selected Poems , her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even―and especially―in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.
Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred―urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such New and Selected Poems , her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even―and especially―in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.
Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred―urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published October 5, 2021
51 people are currently reading
862 people want to read
About the author
Tracy K. Smith
39books806followersTracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
April 2, 2024
We saw to the edge of all there is -
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
-
In 2017, Tracy K. Smith became the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, an honor that was well deserved. Such Color: New and Selected Poems is an incredible overview of Smith’s fabulous career, with her four volumes of poetry� including the Pulitzer Prize winning collection —and a handful of new poems demonstrating the deftness with which she can make the ordinary into something extraordinary or wrestle with the intangible. �You want a poem to unsettle something,� Smith says and her works shake up reality to glimpse the forces working beneath it while also creating poetry out of unexpected places with her erasure poems. Such Color is a lovely testament to the brilliant mind of Tracy K. Smith who has certainly earned her status as an essential US poet.
An Old Story
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
For Tracy K. Smith, poetry is about connection. In her memoir, , she discusses on how poetry is a �voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive,� and how this can find the common threads that unite us all. �One of poetry’s great effects,� she says in her lecture Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology (), �through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music and image � things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why � is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.� Poetry can tap into the collective of humanity the way a good rhythm in a song can bring all sorts of people together. It is a way we share experience, learn, grow, or simply have space to be heard, seen and hopefully better understood. �Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.� This is something we all need, and I love that Smith’s work aims to emphasize this aspect of poetry.
The Weather in Space
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive�
Faces radiant with panic.
Smith served as US Poet Laureate from 2017 through 2019 (the honor was then passed to , another amazing poet) and I’ve always found it fairly amusing she was doing this work during the Trump administration, similar to my amusement of producing anti-war poetry as Poet Laureate during the Bush administration. During this time she toured the country talking poetry, with a particular focus on rural communities through her series . She strove to build a �bridge between people in cities and university towns, where poetry festivals and reading series are quite common, and those in rural parts of the United States, where such programming doesn’t often reach� she said, �because poems put us in touch with our most powerful memories, feelings, questions and wishes.� She also released a small but powerful anthology, American Journal, which aimed to capture the American experience through marginalized voices that are often left out of the conversation.
�The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.�
This collection spans Smith’s four volumes, beginning with which won her the Cave Canem prize in 2002 and ending with a batch of new poetry that feels a perfect encapsulation of many of her themes and includes a poem written to musician titled Dock of the Bay. Smith’s references to historical figures and musicians permeates her work, with her Pulitzer Winning collection, , frequently speaking to the musician who penned the song from which the book takes it’s title. �That's Bowie / For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play / Within a play, he's trademarked twice.� That particular collection is outstanding, moving through poems about grief and elegies for her father, the Iraq war, and into prospective futures. There are poems about space and telescopes, and I do love a poem that can incorporate science fiction elements such as the poem Sci Fi imagines a utopian world of equality and innovation:
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow�
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once
And for all, scrutable and safe.
Perhaps one of the most moving poems, It & Co. also dives into an essential theme of her work. The poem explores the �it� of her poetry and all the things “it� can be during a period of grieving (both personal and political), with “it� always being in a state of flux with an elusive meaning (you can hear the full poem read by her ):
We are a part of It. Not guests.
Is It us, or what contains us?
How can It be anything but an idea,
Something teetering on the spine
Of the number i? It is elegant
But coy. It avoids the blunt ends
Of our fingers as we point. We
Have gone looking for It everywhere:
In Bibles and bandwidth, blooming
Like a wound from the ocean floor.
Still, It resists the matter of false vs. real.
Unconvinced by our zeal, It is un-
Appeasable. It is like some novels:
Vast and unreadable.
I appreciate the vastness of her works, which also apply to the variety of styles and topics Smith utilizes. The collection includes ”Into the Moonless Night�, written as a play in poetry about teenagers who were kidnapped in Uganda and given as “wives� to rebel commanders and forced to bear their children. In lectures, Smith encourages poets to draw from the world around them, using events but also finding poetry in words that already exist. For example, Smith uses the note found on the body of 9 year old Particio Hilario found dead on the streets in Rio in 1989 as the title of a poem�”I Killed You Because You Didn’t Go to School and Had No Future�—and uses it for a horrific perspective on tragedy. Smith also enjoys mining existing texts to create erasure poems. The collection is full of them, from actual letters by Black civil war soldiers seeking compensation, or her erasure of the Declaration of Independence.
Declaration
He has
sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people
He has plundered our �
ravaged our �
destroyed the lives of our �
taking away our �
abolishing our most valuable �
and altering fundamentally the Forms of our �
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for
Redress in the most humble terms:�
Tracy K. Smith creates marvels through her poetry and Such Color collects the best highlights for us all to experience her career within a single binding. It is an essential volume as her words are ones I turn to quite often, particularly in moments of national turmoil. I wish this edition had included some sort of introduction—I love reading someone discuss a poet’s works—but the notes section is quite elaborate with all the references and inspirations from society that she reshapes into her poems. An incredible selected works from an incredible poet.
5/5
The Everlasting Self
Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction�
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
-
In 2017, Tracy K. Smith became the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, an honor that was well deserved. Such Color: New and Selected Poems is an incredible overview of Smith’s fabulous career, with her four volumes of poetry� including the Pulitzer Prize winning collection —and a handful of new poems demonstrating the deftness with which she can make the ordinary into something extraordinary or wrestle with the intangible. �You want a poem to unsettle something,� Smith says and her works shake up reality to glimpse the forces working beneath it while also creating poetry out of unexpected places with her erasure poems. Such Color is a lovely testament to the brilliant mind of Tracy K. Smith who has certainly earned her status as an essential US poet.
An Old Story
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
For Tracy K. Smith, poetry is about connection. In her memoir, , she discusses on how poetry is a �voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive,� and how this can find the common threads that unite us all. �One of poetry’s great effects,� she says in her lecture Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology (), �through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music and image � things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why � is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.� Poetry can tap into the collective of humanity the way a good rhythm in a song can bring all sorts of people together. It is a way we share experience, learn, grow, or simply have space to be heard, seen and hopefully better understood. �Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.� This is something we all need, and I love that Smith’s work aims to emphasize this aspect of poetry.
The Weather in Space
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive�
Faces radiant with panic.
Smith served as US Poet Laureate from 2017 through 2019 (the honor was then passed to , another amazing poet) and I’ve always found it fairly amusing she was doing this work during the Trump administration, similar to my amusement of producing anti-war poetry as Poet Laureate during the Bush administration. During this time she toured the country talking poetry, with a particular focus on rural communities through her series . She strove to build a �bridge between people in cities and university towns, where poetry festivals and reading series are quite common, and those in rural parts of the United States, where such programming doesn’t often reach� she said, �because poems put us in touch with our most powerful memories, feelings, questions and wishes.� She also released a small but powerful anthology, American Journal, which aimed to capture the American experience through marginalized voices that are often left out of the conversation.
�The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.�
This collection spans Smith’s four volumes, beginning with which won her the Cave Canem prize in 2002 and ending with a batch of new poetry that feels a perfect encapsulation of many of her themes and includes a poem written to musician titled Dock of the Bay. Smith’s references to historical figures and musicians permeates her work, with her Pulitzer Winning collection, , frequently speaking to the musician who penned the song from which the book takes it’s title. �That's Bowie / For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play / Within a play, he's trademarked twice.� That particular collection is outstanding, moving through poems about grief and elegies for her father, the Iraq war, and into prospective futures. There are poems about space and telescopes, and I do love a poem that can incorporate science fiction elements such as the poem Sci Fi imagines a utopian world of equality and innovation:
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow�
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once
And for all, scrutable and safe.
Perhaps one of the most moving poems, It & Co. also dives into an essential theme of her work. The poem explores the �it� of her poetry and all the things “it� can be during a period of grieving (both personal and political), with “it� always being in a state of flux with an elusive meaning (you can hear the full poem read by her ):
We are a part of It. Not guests.
Is It us, or what contains us?
How can It be anything but an idea,
Something teetering on the spine
Of the number i? It is elegant
But coy. It avoids the blunt ends
Of our fingers as we point. We
Have gone looking for It everywhere:
In Bibles and bandwidth, blooming
Like a wound from the ocean floor.
Still, It resists the matter of false vs. real.
Unconvinced by our zeal, It is un-
Appeasable. It is like some novels:
Vast and unreadable.
I appreciate the vastness of her works, which also apply to the variety of styles and topics Smith utilizes. The collection includes ”Into the Moonless Night�, written as a play in poetry about teenagers who were kidnapped in Uganda and given as “wives� to rebel commanders and forced to bear their children. In lectures, Smith encourages poets to draw from the world around them, using events but also finding poetry in words that already exist. For example, Smith uses the note found on the body of 9 year old Particio Hilario found dead on the streets in Rio in 1989 as the title of a poem�”I Killed You Because You Didn’t Go to School and Had No Future�—and uses it for a horrific perspective on tragedy. Smith also enjoys mining existing texts to create erasure poems. The collection is full of them, from actual letters by Black civil war soldiers seeking compensation, or her erasure of the Declaration of Independence.
Declaration
He has
sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people
He has plundered our �
ravaged our �
destroyed the lives of our �
taking away our �
abolishing our most valuable �
and altering fundamentally the Forms of our �
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for
Redress in the most humble terms:�
Tracy K. Smith creates marvels through her poetry and Such Color collects the best highlights for us all to experience her career within a single binding. It is an essential volume as her words are ones I turn to quite often, particularly in moments of national turmoil. I wish this edition had included some sort of introduction—I love reading someone discuss a poet’s works—but the notes section is quite elaborate with all the references and inspirations from society that she reshapes into her poems. An incredible selected works from an incredible poet.
5/5
The Everlasting Self
Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction�
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.
Read
December 20, 2021Sleep, Bee, deep and easy.
Hive, heave, give, grieve.
Then rise when you're ready
from your soul's hard floor
to sweet work
or some war.
- from "Bee on a Sill"
Such Color: New and Selected Poems was a moving collection of Tracy K. Smith's poetry. Wade in the Water remains one of my favorite poetry collections so I really enjoyed the chance to revisit some poems from that work as well as from Smith's other collections. The poems cover a huge range of topics with Smith's knack for taking the abstract and making it feel personal, whether that's envisioning the future or reaching back into the past through archival sources.
Hive, heave, give, grieve.
Then rise when you're ready
from your soul's hard floor
to sweet work
or some war.
- from "Bee on a Sill"
Such Color: New and Selected Poems was a moving collection of Tracy K. Smith's poetry. Wade in the Water remains one of my favorite poetry collections so I really enjoyed the chance to revisit some poems from that work as well as from Smith's other collections. The poems cover a huge range of topics with Smith's knack for taking the abstract and making it feel personal, whether that's envisioning the future or reaching back into the past through archival sources.
March 20, 2022
This is an excellent overview of Tracy K Smith's already astonishing life in poetry, with stirring selections from The Body's Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011) and Wade in the Water (2018). Viewed chronologically, there is a real sense of momentum going from her early to more recent work, exploring with increasing intensity themes of injustice, generational trauma, mortality and spirituality. And then wow, the new poems are such compressed and urgent brilliance, signalling that we still have so much to enjoy and learn from this poet.
January 25, 2022
What a gift to revisit so many of Smith's wonderful moments and to read the new work. It's great to see it all here together and to trace the movement of this poet in time and space. Here are some favorite moments:
Last night, it was bright afternoon
The hydrangea begins as a small, bright world.
There was a sea in my marriage.
What kind of game is the sea?
THE UNIVERSE IS A HOUSE PARTY
Last night, it was bright afternoon
The hydrangea begins as a small, bright world.
There was a sea in my marriage.
What kind of game is the sea?
THE UNIVERSE IS A HOUSE PARTY
Read
December 1, 2024Not my cup of tea
July 31, 2022
Lovely and illuminating. “Such Color� is a collection of Tracy K. Smith’s best poems and additional new works.
My favorite poem was “The Machinery of Evening,� and the lines:
In a place too beautiful
To exist, is you.
But I reach for it
And we are closer.
I enjoyed reading all of her poems, slowly, taking my time, letting the words sink in - though some stayed with me more than others.
Here are some of favorite lines throughout:
We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves
The hydrangea begins as a small, bright world.
I speak another language, I told her. I love.
I don’t want to rise
From this bed or this life, your head heavy
Beside mine in the low space
Where everything that means something happens.
It is true that death resists the present tense. But memory does death one better. Ignores the future.
She will never be free
Because she is afraid. He
Will never be free
Because he has always
Been free.
Windows open to the faint breath
Of the inevitable
Like a dark star. I want to last.
This is the only world:
Our opaque lives. Our secrets. And that’s all.
A streak of orange, a cloud of smoke unfurls.
Red light of dusk,
and something - gold hot bright -
knifing the horizon.
Some trees bear our very scars.
My favorite poem was “The Machinery of Evening,� and the lines:
In a place too beautiful
To exist, is you.
But I reach for it
And we are closer.
I enjoyed reading all of her poems, slowly, taking my time, letting the words sink in - though some stayed with me more than others.
Here are some of favorite lines throughout:
We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves
The hydrangea begins as a small, bright world.
I speak another language, I told her. I love.
I don’t want to rise
From this bed or this life, your head heavy
Beside mine in the low space
Where everything that means something happens.
It is true that death resists the present tense. But memory does death one better. Ignores the future.
She will never be free
Because she is afraid. He
Will never be free
Because he has always
Been free.
Windows open to the faint breath
Of the inevitable
Like a dark star. I want to last.
This is the only world:
Our opaque lives. Our secrets. And that’s all.
A streak of orange, a cloud of smoke unfurls.
Red light of dusk,
and something - gold hot bright -
knifing the horizon.
Some trees bear our very scars.
March 27, 2022
I felt every word and punctuation in this collection. It reverberated through me and I could see, hear, and smell all of it.
This is the kind of collection that will make you want to go back and edit all of your reviews because the scale of it all is off.
This is the kind of collection that will make you want to go back and edit all of your reviews because the scale of it all is off.
September 8, 2022
tracy k smith is my new favorite poet <3 this book provided a first look into all her other collections which was perfect for me. i loved all of them but my favorites were definitely from the body's question and duende!!
August 13, 2021
Smith is simply a genius. Could easily become a go-to collection like Oliver's Devotions. A good way for people to get into modern poetry imo
thanks to netgalley for the ARC
thanks to netgalley for the ARC
October 17, 2023
favorites: dusk, life on mars, annunciation, the universe is a house party. thank you oscar for loaning this to me!!!
October 15, 2021
What moves is invisible. Like music. I move in it, into it.
What is the soul allowed to keep?
We saw to the edge of all there is�
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
It feels Like nothing, until it lets me go.
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
I shout my name
Into the traffic, and if my voice
Is big enough, someone will hear it.
It will land where it needs to land,
And someone will catch it
And come looking.
We live� We live�
deep color our heart leaps.
That was a found poem from this phenomenal, majestic, magnificent collection. Tracy K. Smith is the poet of our generation and time. I don’t think she missed anything in the canon of what it means to be alive today, together. It is heart breaking, it is hard to read, it is heart itself, maybe soul, maybe just the truth so simply laid out here, you become breathless. Not like breathless from beauty, more of a gasp of understanding at the beauty behind the pain, and hope, hope never explicitly stated but stitched into each line. Really important poetry that is also accessible.
GOSPEL: MANUEL
There’s a story told here
By those of us who daydream
To the music of crystal and steel.
We brought it down
From mountains built of fog
Where we left the girls we married
And old men married to the earth.
We fed on it when there was nothing.
From hunger, it grew large.
And from that dark spot low in each of us
Where alone we disappear to, breathing
The cool nothing of night, letting the city
Farther inside with each siren bleat
Each assault of neon light, grounding
Ourselves to this world with one hand
Under the head, the other invisible�
From that spot it became a woman.
Part mother, part more.
DROUGHT
1. The hydrangea begins as a small, bright world.
Mother buries rusty nails, and the flowers
Weep blue and pink. I am alone in the garden,
And like all else that is living, I lean into the sun.
Each bouquet will cringe and die in time
While the dry earth watches. It is ugly,
And the earth is ugly to allow it. Still, the petals
Curl and drop. Mother calls it an exquisite waste,
But there is no choice. I learn how:
Before letting go, open yourself completely.
Wait. When the heavens fail to answer,
Curse the heavens. Wither and bend.
CREDULITY
…There are whole doctrines on loving.
A science. I would like to know everything
About convincing love to give me
What it does not possess to give.
And then I would like to know how to live with nothing.
Not memory. Nor the taste of the words
I have willed you whisper into my mouth
WINTERING
…White light bears down on the wordless sky.
I dreamt again of my mother.
I sat beside her, trying to forget the years of grief,
Trying to understand the puzzle of life in her body.
I speak another language, I told her. I love.
She watched without speaking, as if to say
Think of where I have been, what I’ve seen.
Joy
�
It is true that death resists the present tense.
But memory does death one better. Ignores the future.
We sat in that room until the wood was spent.
We never left the room. The wood was never spent.
BRIGHT
One night as Prince Henry of Portugal lay in bed it was revealed to him that he would render a great service to our Lord by the discovery of the said Ethiopias. —Duarte Pachece Pereira, Portuguese explorer, 1506
So they weren’t sure
At first that what they saw
Wasn’t simply the mind
Telling them Enough
Or whether it was true.
Lean bodies. Shadows
Incarnate with a grace
Both dark and bright.
As though the world
Were showing off.
Black. Like sable.
Like the deep
Center of the darkest fruit,
The first fig. Primordial.
Not sin—not yet�
But satisfaction. Black
As the space between stars,
Distance not fathomed. Fearsome.
At first sight
Of those bodies,
Like mine
Or any other� No: like mine
But intact—why
Did those men,
Asway that entire day,
Seadrunk
On parched land,
Not think: The Lord is Grand.
Why was that riddle
Not something
They knelt to?
Why, Instead, did they take it as sign
That their want
Should lead
Even as I push my fork
Into the belly of each
Sleeping fish,
Testing for give, tasting
That distant dream
Of watery flight,
I wonder if you�
Your language of vowels,
Blood that whispers
Back to sails atilt
On some horizon,
Back to men like that�
And I—whose work
Tonight will be
Only to offer�
I wonder if you and I
Have not, perhaps,
Beheld one another�
Flash of teeth, trickle
Of adrenaline�
Elsewhere, and Before.
THE MACHINERY OF EVENING
I am looking for my best words.
Willful things
That feint and dart.
If I find them,
I will understand
The hunger that stirs us,
That settles like a weight
Pushing us Into that vivid dark.
�
You are looking too
In that language you exhale
Like globes of air
That rise and break
On the surface of what is real.
I love you. These are not
The words any more
Than that hidden skin,
Dark from childhood
In a place too beautiful
To exist, is you.
But I reach for it
And we are closer.
Do you ever wonder
If the answer is what gets said
Again and again
When my body
Houses our two bodies
And we are both
Very briefly Filled? When we
Open our mouths
And that gladness
Rushes out and around us
�
These days, I believe
In everything.
That you and I
Are real. That this room,
This simple life
Have gone on
And will go on.
In this pause,
This dim hour
Between hours, I want
To be what waits
To be said. I touch you.
SHADOW POEM
You know me
But the gauze that fetters the earth
Keeps you from knowing
We were souls together once
Wave after wave of ether
Alive outside of time
HISTORY
�
Once there was a great cloud
Of primeval matter. Atoms and atoms.
By believing, we made it the world.
We named the animals out of need.
Made ourselves human out of need.
There were other inventions.
Plunder and damage. Insatiable fire.
___________________
Epilogue: The Seventh Day
There are ways of naming the wound.
There are ways of entering the dream
The way a painter enters a studio: To spill.
MINISTER OF SAUDADE
The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness. —A. F. G. Bell, In Portugal
The water is full of blue paint
From all the little fishing boats
Corralled for Sunday, abob in the breeze.
What kind of game is the sea? Lap and drag.
Crag and gleam. That continual work of wave
And tide, like a wet wind, blowing
The earth down to nothing. Our lives are small.
And mine Is small and sharp. I try to toss it
Off into the distance, forget it
For good. Then my foot steps down
Onto an edge and it’s mine again,
All prick and spine. Like a burr
Deep in winter fur. And I am
Most certainly that bear. Famished�.
The sky here is clear of cloud and bird,
Just the sun blaring steadily through ether.
What moves is invisible. Like music. I move in it, into it.
It feels Like nothing, until it lets me go.
DUENDE
1. The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
�
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill�
I’m going to braid my hair
Braid many colors into my hair
I’ll put a long braid in my hair
And write your name there
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
THEFT
In 1963 John Dall, a Ho-Chunk Indian, was taken from his mother’s home as part of a federal project to reduce poverty in Native American communities. He moved from foster home to foster home, haunted by recurring dreams and unsure of his own history. Years later, he was located by members of his tribe. The word Ho-Chunk means “people of the big voice.� —The Chicago Reader
The world shatters
Through Mother’s black hair.
I breathe smoke,
Tincture of sudden berries.
Mother covers my eyes,
But this heat is inside.
It trickles out, a map
Of hot tears across my face.
And rivers, my own rivers,
Pushing out from the desert
Between my legs�
One night when our bellies groan,
I quiet myself watching bare branches
Scratch against the moon. If night
Has a voice, it is surely this wind
In these trees.
I get off the train. Walk backwards
Over bridges. Watch perspective
Diminish. Watch my breath,
My ideas hover and drift
In perfect clouds. They’ll
Drop eventually, mingle
With a river or lake. Might
Even one day make it back to me.
As rain, maybe, or a tall glass
I drink quickly, blind
With thirst. I shout my name
Into the traffic, and if my voice
Is big enough, someone will hear it.
It will land where it needs to land,
And someone will catch it
And come looking.
THE WEATHER IN SPACE
�
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive�
Faces radiant with panic.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room.
And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.
�
Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip�
When all along, space might be chock-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.
�
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being.
�
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright
�
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is�
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
THE LARGENESS WE CAN’T SEE
When our laughter skids across the floor
Like beads yanked from some girl’s throat,
What waits where the laughter gathers?
And later, when our saw-toothed breaths
Lay us down on a bed of leaves, what feeds
With ceaseless focus on the leaves?
It’s solid, yet permeable, like a mood.
Like God, it has no face. Like lust,
It flickers on without a prick of guilt.
We move in and out of rooms, leaving
Our dust, our voices pooled on sills.
We hurry from door to door in a downpour
Of days. Old trees inch up, their trunks thick
With new rings. All that we see grows
Into the ground. And all we live blind to
Leans its deathless heft to our ears and sings.
THEY MAY LOVE ALL THAT HE HAS CHOSEN AND HATE ALL THAT HE HAS
�
And how radiant each is,
Touched by understanding, ready to stand
And go forth into that unmistakable light.
The good fight. One by one they rise,
Believing what to do, bowing each head
To what leads. And, empty of fear, buoyant
With the thrill of such might they go.
US & CO.
We are here for what amounts to a few hours,
a day at most.
We feel around making sense of the terrain,
our own new limbs,
Bumping up against a herd of bodies
until one becomes home.
Moments sweep past.
The grass bends then learns again to stand.
THE ANGELS
Two slung themselves across chairs
Once in my motel room. Grizzled,
In leather biker gear. Emissaries
For something I needed to see.
�
Whose very voices cause faint souls to quake. �
Quake, then, fools, and fall away! �
What God do you imagine we obey?
Think of the toil we must cost them,
One scaled perfectly to eternity. And still, they come, telling us
Through the ages not to fear. Just those two that once and never
Again for me since, though There are—are there?�
Sightings, flashes, hints: A proud tree in vivid sun, branches
Swaying in strong wind. Rain Hurling itself at the roof.
Boulders, Mounds of earth mistaken for dead
Does, lions in crouch. A rust-stained pipe
Where a house once stood, which I
Take each time I pass it for an owl.
Bright whorl so dangerous and near.
My mother sat whispering with it
At the end of her life
While all the rooms of our house
Filled up with night.
THE GREATEST PERSONAL PRIVATION
It is a painful and harassing business
Belonging to her. We have had trouble enough,
Have no comfort or confidence in them,
And they appear unhappy themselves, no doubt
From the trouble they have occasioned.
�
Glad if we may have hope of the loss of trouble.
I remain in glad conscience, at peace with
God And the world! I have prayed for those people
Many, many, very many times.
GHAZAL
The sky is a dry pitiless white.
The wide rows stretch on into death.
Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name.
History is a ship forever setting sail.
On either shore: mountains of men,
Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name.
�
THE UNITED STATES WELCOMES YOU
Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing?
Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light? What are you demanding
That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then
What is that leaping in your chest? What is
The nature of your mission? Do you seek
To offer a confession? Have you anything to do
With others brought by us to harm? Then
Why are you afraid? And why do you invade
Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute
As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we
Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?
UNREST IN BATON ROUGE after the photo by Jonathan Bachman
�
Our bodies run with ink-dark blood.
Blood pools in the pavement’s seams.
Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?
�
ETERNITY
Landscape Painting
It is as if I can almost still remember.
As if I once perhaps belonged here.
The mountains a deep heavy green, and
The rocky steep drop to the waters
What is the soul allowed to keep? Every
Birth, every small gift, every ache?
I know I have knelt just here, torn apart by loss. Lazed
On this grass, counting joys like trees: cypress,
Blue fir, dogwood, cherry. Ageless, constant,
Growing down into earth and up into history.
THE EVERLASTING SELF
Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction�
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.
RIOT 1.
Sometimes I feel the
Black in my heart like a map made of tar.
You need only part your lips to mar what isn’t yours.
Can you hold my death in your mind?
Can you leave it there? Live- and-let-grieve?
I like you. And like you, I move through the days.
A dark shape is what my body makes.
Good is how I was taught to look, to be,
despite what’s done to me. (Woe is me.)
To-say-is-to-do is also true. (Woe is you.)
This is not the riot. This is reality.
It rolls, roils, briefly recoils.
It hammers down.
We fall, rebound.
You chase, we race.
You hate, we wait.
WE FEEL NOW A LARGENESS COMING ON
Being called all manner of things
from the Dictionary of Shame�
not English, not words, not heard,
but worn, borne, carried, never spent�
we feel now a largeness coming on,
something passing into us.
We know not in what source it was begun,
but rapt, we watch it rise through our fallen,
our slain, our millions dragged, chained.
Like daylight setting leaves alight� green
to gold to blinding white. Like a spirit caught.
--ڱ�.
SOULWORK
One’s is to feed. One’s is to cleave.
One’s to be doubled over under greed.
One’s is strife. One’s to be strangled by life.
One’s to be called and to rise.
One’s to stare fire in the eye.
One’s is bondage to pleasure.
One’s to be held captive by power.
One’s to drive a nation to its naked knees in war.
One’s is the rapture of stolen hours.
One’s to be called yet cower.
One’s is to defend the dead.
One’s to suffer until ego is shed.
One’s is to dribble the nectar of evil.
One’s but to roll a stone up a hill.
One’s to crouch low
over damp kindling in deep snow
coaxing the thin plume of cautious smoke.
One’s is only to shiver. One’s is only to blow.
RAPTURE
And, on a simpler level, I want you to look up at these things that are happening to Black people, not down—the way you would stare at the sun. —Arthur Jafa
It was a stirring and a rising. Like vapor. A gathering up and a lifting off. And then it was a swarm. All the many coalescing as a form unified in its going. Where? Like I said up and off. A rapture. Sometimes the light reversed course, reaching into me. A bright resonance, a flood spilling down. But soon it whorled, spun around, lifting over the trees, over the scraped stone tops of mountains to disappear through a ring of sky.
RIOT
We live� We live� in my city and yours and on far shores nationless
We live� We live� standing risen on solid authority in the light and not quietly
We live� morning sun
We live� evening come
We live� generations hence
We live� We live�
deep color our heart leaps
We live� over and again our heart leaps
We live� gold hot bright the line of us never tiring
We live—We live.
What is the soul allowed to keep?
We saw to the edge of all there is�
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
It feels Like nothing, until it lets me go.
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
I shout my name
Into the traffic, and if my voice
Is big enough, someone will hear it.
It will land where it needs to land,
And someone will catch it
And come looking.
We live� We live�
deep color our heart leaps.
That was a found poem from this phenomenal, majestic, magnificent collection. Tracy K. Smith is the poet of our generation and time. I don’t think she missed anything in the canon of what it means to be alive today, together. It is heart breaking, it is hard to read, it is heart itself, maybe soul, maybe just the truth so simply laid out here, you become breathless. Not like breathless from beauty, more of a gasp of understanding at the beauty behind the pain, and hope, hope never explicitly stated but stitched into each line. Really important poetry that is also accessible.
GOSPEL: MANUEL
There’s a story told here
By those of us who daydream
To the music of crystal and steel.
We brought it down
From mountains built of fog
Where we left the girls we married
And old men married to the earth.
We fed on it when there was nothing.
From hunger, it grew large.
And from that dark spot low in each of us
Where alone we disappear to, breathing
The cool nothing of night, letting the city
Farther inside with each siren bleat
Each assault of neon light, grounding
Ourselves to this world with one hand
Under the head, the other invisible�
From that spot it became a woman.
Part mother, part more.
DROUGHT
1. The hydrangea begins as a small, bright world.
Mother buries rusty nails, and the flowers
Weep blue and pink. I am alone in the garden,
And like all else that is living, I lean into the sun.
Each bouquet will cringe and die in time
While the dry earth watches. It is ugly,
And the earth is ugly to allow it. Still, the petals
Curl and drop. Mother calls it an exquisite waste,
But there is no choice. I learn how:
Before letting go, open yourself completely.
Wait. When the heavens fail to answer,
Curse the heavens. Wither and bend.
CREDULITY
…There are whole doctrines on loving.
A science. I would like to know everything
About convincing love to give me
What it does not possess to give.
And then I would like to know how to live with nothing.
Not memory. Nor the taste of the words
I have willed you whisper into my mouth
WINTERING
…White light bears down on the wordless sky.
I dreamt again of my mother.
I sat beside her, trying to forget the years of grief,
Trying to understand the puzzle of life in her body.
I speak another language, I told her. I love.
She watched without speaking, as if to say
Think of where I have been, what I’ve seen.
Joy
�
It is true that death resists the present tense.
But memory does death one better. Ignores the future.
We sat in that room until the wood was spent.
We never left the room. The wood was never spent.
BRIGHT
One night as Prince Henry of Portugal lay in bed it was revealed to him that he would render a great service to our Lord by the discovery of the said Ethiopias. —Duarte Pachece Pereira, Portuguese explorer, 1506
So they weren’t sure
At first that what they saw
Wasn’t simply the mind
Telling them Enough
Or whether it was true.
Lean bodies. Shadows
Incarnate with a grace
Both dark and bright.
As though the world
Were showing off.
Black. Like sable.
Like the deep
Center of the darkest fruit,
The first fig. Primordial.
Not sin—not yet�
But satisfaction. Black
As the space between stars,
Distance not fathomed. Fearsome.
At first sight
Of those bodies,
Like mine
Or any other� No: like mine
But intact—why
Did those men,
Asway that entire day,
Seadrunk
On parched land,
Not think: The Lord is Grand.
Why was that riddle
Not something
They knelt to?
Why, Instead, did they take it as sign
That their want
Should lead
Even as I push my fork
Into the belly of each
Sleeping fish,
Testing for give, tasting
That distant dream
Of watery flight,
I wonder if you�
Your language of vowels,
Blood that whispers
Back to sails atilt
On some horizon,
Back to men like that�
And I—whose work
Tonight will be
Only to offer�
I wonder if you and I
Have not, perhaps,
Beheld one another�
Flash of teeth, trickle
Of adrenaline�
Elsewhere, and Before.
THE MACHINERY OF EVENING
I am looking for my best words.
Willful things
That feint and dart.
If I find them,
I will understand
The hunger that stirs us,
That settles like a weight
Pushing us Into that vivid dark.
�
You are looking too
In that language you exhale
Like globes of air
That rise and break
On the surface of what is real.
I love you. These are not
The words any more
Than that hidden skin,
Dark from childhood
In a place too beautiful
To exist, is you.
But I reach for it
And we are closer.
Do you ever wonder
If the answer is what gets said
Again and again
When my body
Houses our two bodies
And we are both
Very briefly Filled? When we
Open our mouths
And that gladness
Rushes out and around us
�
These days, I believe
In everything.
That you and I
Are real. That this room,
This simple life
Have gone on
And will go on.
In this pause,
This dim hour
Between hours, I want
To be what waits
To be said. I touch you.
SHADOW POEM
You know me
But the gauze that fetters the earth
Keeps you from knowing
We were souls together once
Wave after wave of ether
Alive outside of time
HISTORY
�
Once there was a great cloud
Of primeval matter. Atoms and atoms.
By believing, we made it the world.
We named the animals out of need.
Made ourselves human out of need.
There were other inventions.
Plunder and damage. Insatiable fire.
___________________
Epilogue: The Seventh Day
There are ways of naming the wound.
There are ways of entering the dream
The way a painter enters a studio: To spill.
MINISTER OF SAUDADE
The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness. —A. F. G. Bell, In Portugal
The water is full of blue paint
From all the little fishing boats
Corralled for Sunday, abob in the breeze.
What kind of game is the sea? Lap and drag.
Crag and gleam. That continual work of wave
And tide, like a wet wind, blowing
The earth down to nothing. Our lives are small.
And mine Is small and sharp. I try to toss it
Off into the distance, forget it
For good. Then my foot steps down
Onto an edge and it’s mine again,
All prick and spine. Like a burr
Deep in winter fur. And I am
Most certainly that bear. Famished�.
The sky here is clear of cloud and bird,
Just the sun blaring steadily through ether.
What moves is invisible. Like music. I move in it, into it.
It feels Like nothing, until it lets me go.
DUENDE
1. The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
�
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill�
I’m going to braid my hair
Braid many colors into my hair
I’ll put a long braid in my hair
And write your name there
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
THEFT
In 1963 John Dall, a Ho-Chunk Indian, was taken from his mother’s home as part of a federal project to reduce poverty in Native American communities. He moved from foster home to foster home, haunted by recurring dreams and unsure of his own history. Years later, he was located by members of his tribe. The word Ho-Chunk means “people of the big voice.� —The Chicago Reader
The world shatters
Through Mother’s black hair.
I breathe smoke,
Tincture of sudden berries.
Mother covers my eyes,
But this heat is inside.
It trickles out, a map
Of hot tears across my face.
And rivers, my own rivers,
Pushing out from the desert
Between my legs�
One night when our bellies groan,
I quiet myself watching bare branches
Scratch against the moon. If night
Has a voice, it is surely this wind
In these trees.
I get off the train. Walk backwards
Over bridges. Watch perspective
Diminish. Watch my breath,
My ideas hover and drift
In perfect clouds. They’ll
Drop eventually, mingle
With a river or lake. Might
Even one day make it back to me.
As rain, maybe, or a tall glass
I drink quickly, blind
With thirst. I shout my name
Into the traffic, and if my voice
Is big enough, someone will hear it.
It will land where it needs to land,
And someone will catch it
And come looking.
THE WEATHER IN SPACE
�
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we’re certain to lose, so alive�
Faces radiant with panic.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room.
And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.
�
Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip�
When all along, space might be chock-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.
�
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being.
�
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright
�
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is�
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
THE LARGENESS WE CAN’T SEE
When our laughter skids across the floor
Like beads yanked from some girl’s throat,
What waits where the laughter gathers?
And later, when our saw-toothed breaths
Lay us down on a bed of leaves, what feeds
With ceaseless focus on the leaves?
It’s solid, yet permeable, like a mood.
Like God, it has no face. Like lust,
It flickers on without a prick of guilt.
We move in and out of rooms, leaving
Our dust, our voices pooled on sills.
We hurry from door to door in a downpour
Of days. Old trees inch up, their trunks thick
With new rings. All that we see grows
Into the ground. And all we live blind to
Leans its deathless heft to our ears and sings.
THEY MAY LOVE ALL THAT HE HAS CHOSEN AND HATE ALL THAT HE HAS
�
And how radiant each is,
Touched by understanding, ready to stand
And go forth into that unmistakable light.
The good fight. One by one they rise,
Believing what to do, bowing each head
To what leads. And, empty of fear, buoyant
With the thrill of such might they go.
US & CO.
We are here for what amounts to a few hours,
a day at most.
We feel around making sense of the terrain,
our own new limbs,
Bumping up against a herd of bodies
until one becomes home.
Moments sweep past.
The grass bends then learns again to stand.
THE ANGELS
Two slung themselves across chairs
Once in my motel room. Grizzled,
In leather biker gear. Emissaries
For something I needed to see.
�
Whose very voices cause faint souls to quake. �
Quake, then, fools, and fall away! �
What God do you imagine we obey?
Think of the toil we must cost them,
One scaled perfectly to eternity. And still, they come, telling us
Through the ages not to fear. Just those two that once and never
Again for me since, though There are—are there?�
Sightings, flashes, hints: A proud tree in vivid sun, branches
Swaying in strong wind. Rain Hurling itself at the roof.
Boulders, Mounds of earth mistaken for dead
Does, lions in crouch. A rust-stained pipe
Where a house once stood, which I
Take each time I pass it for an owl.
Bright whorl so dangerous and near.
My mother sat whispering with it
At the end of her life
While all the rooms of our house
Filled up with night.
THE GREATEST PERSONAL PRIVATION
It is a painful and harassing business
Belonging to her. We have had trouble enough,
Have no comfort or confidence in them,
And they appear unhappy themselves, no doubt
From the trouble they have occasioned.
�
Glad if we may have hope of the loss of trouble.
I remain in glad conscience, at peace with
God And the world! I have prayed for those people
Many, many, very many times.
GHAZAL
The sky is a dry pitiless white.
The wide rows stretch on into death.
Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name.
History is a ship forever setting sail.
On either shore: mountains of men,
Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name.
�
THE UNITED STATES WELCOMES YOU
Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing?
Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light? What are you demanding
That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then
What is that leaping in your chest? What is
The nature of your mission? Do you seek
To offer a confession? Have you anything to do
With others brought by us to harm? Then
Why are you afraid? And why do you invade
Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute
As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we
Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?
UNREST IN BATON ROUGE after the photo by Jonathan Bachman
�
Our bodies run with ink-dark blood.
Blood pools in the pavement’s seams.
Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?
�
ETERNITY
Landscape Painting
It is as if I can almost still remember.
As if I once perhaps belonged here.
The mountains a deep heavy green, and
The rocky steep drop to the waters
What is the soul allowed to keep? Every
Birth, every small gift, every ache?
I know I have knelt just here, torn apart by loss. Lazed
On this grass, counting joys like trees: cypress,
Blue fir, dogwood, cherry. Ageless, constant,
Growing down into earth and up into history.
THE EVERLASTING SELF
Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction�
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.
RIOT 1.
Sometimes I feel the
Black in my heart like a map made of tar.
You need only part your lips to mar what isn’t yours.
Can you hold my death in your mind?
Can you leave it there? Live- and-let-grieve?
I like you. And like you, I move through the days.
A dark shape is what my body makes.
Good is how I was taught to look, to be,
despite what’s done to me. (Woe is me.)
To-say-is-to-do is also true. (Woe is you.)
This is not the riot. This is reality.
It rolls, roils, briefly recoils.
It hammers down.
We fall, rebound.
You chase, we race.
You hate, we wait.
WE FEEL NOW A LARGENESS COMING ON
Being called all manner of things
from the Dictionary of Shame�
not English, not words, not heard,
but worn, borne, carried, never spent�
we feel now a largeness coming on,
something passing into us.
We know not in what source it was begun,
but rapt, we watch it rise through our fallen,
our slain, our millions dragged, chained.
Like daylight setting leaves alight� green
to gold to blinding white. Like a spirit caught.
--ڱ�.
SOULWORK
One’s is to feed. One’s is to cleave.
One’s to be doubled over under greed.
One’s is strife. One’s to be strangled by life.
One’s to be called and to rise.
One’s to stare fire in the eye.
One’s is bondage to pleasure.
One’s to be held captive by power.
One’s to drive a nation to its naked knees in war.
One’s is the rapture of stolen hours.
One’s to be called yet cower.
One’s is to defend the dead.
One’s to suffer until ego is shed.
One’s is to dribble the nectar of evil.
One’s but to roll a stone up a hill.
One’s to crouch low
over damp kindling in deep snow
coaxing the thin plume of cautious smoke.
One’s is only to shiver. One’s is only to blow.
RAPTURE
And, on a simpler level, I want you to look up at these things that are happening to Black people, not down—the way you would stare at the sun. —Arthur Jafa
It was a stirring and a rising. Like vapor. A gathering up and a lifting off. And then it was a swarm. All the many coalescing as a form unified in its going. Where? Like I said up and off. A rapture. Sometimes the light reversed course, reaching into me. A bright resonance, a flood spilling down. But soon it whorled, spun around, lifting over the trees, over the scraped stone tops of mountains to disappear through a ring of sky.
RIOT
We live� We live� in my city and yours and on far shores nationless
We live� We live� standing risen on solid authority in the light and not quietly
We live� morning sun
We live� evening come
We live� generations hence
We live� We live�
deep color our heart leaps
We live� over and again our heart leaps
We live� gold hot bright the line of us never tiring
We live—We live.
August 21, 2024
i think my taste in poetry has changed because i didn’t love the poems i re-visited nor did i care much for the new ones at the end
July 13, 2021
Tracy K. Smith’s collection of old and new poems, Such Colors, is a best hits album to attract old and new readers alike. There is a reason why Smith was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019; she has a way with words and form that make her readers engage in discussions on faith, history, belonging and race. Her use of language and sound echo through complex topics and impactful external sources which range from landscapes to news articles and song lyrics to African American Civil War soldiers� letters and seminal historical documents. Tracy K. Smith pulls inspiration from the world around her, and through the lens of her craft, develops poetry that is both beautiful and thought provoking. One caveat for new readers, this is not a collection that should be read in one sitting. Smith pulls a number of poems from her various prior works and, though reading each section at one go makes sense, the total volume is too long and too dense to reasonably digest in one sitting. There are moments that drag, but even for those who don't feel her work speaks to them, the skill must be respected.
As a whole, this collection traces Smith’s stirrings and awakenings as an author into a singular text. Juxtaposing different points in the writer’s career allows the reader to see the breadth of her work and examine how she both grows as a poet and experiments as a writer over the years. Pieces from The Body’s Question are very experiential, looking to specific moments through the lens of specific emotions that emanate from each situation. The predominant sense in this section is of longing in its assorted shades and contexts. The poems from Duende navigate otherness by giving voice to Ugandan wives gifted to rebel commanders, a child killer justifying their crime, and Native American children taken from their homes. Selections from Life On Mars are more esoteric and less engaging for poetry dabblers as Smith expands into space linguistically and topically, then returns to Earth with examination of human atrocities from differing perspectives. Wade in the Water poems show a range of focus from faith and God to the mistreatment of the planet and its people, African American people in particular. There are some truly thought provoking methods and concepts in this part of the collection for readers to contemplate. Riot is where Smith rewards longtime fans with new works and new forms including found poems, palindromes, and epistolary poems. Each of these new works exudes her strengths as a master of concept and craft.
Tracy K. Smith is unafraid to explore varied perspectives in her poetry. In “Theft�, she speaks from the perspective of a Native American child taken away from tribe and family and into foster care with other children, she writes, “Each in his own/Now.I have never/Thought to cross from mine to theirs,/But I’ve held my hand inches/From my brother’s back and felt/His heat�. There is such solitude and longing expressed in these lines that the reader can truly connect with the sentiment of the speaker. Later, Smith channels a Daughter of the Confederacy from 1915 as hissing, “Let the silence of threat embolden our approach� (“Suggestion�). The range of voices at times creates discomfort and always necessitates confrontation with the truth of the poem. The level of specificity within each piece makes the world tactile. In “Serenade�, she describes, “I am spinning/So giddily the bottles of beer and liquor and the bags bereft of their ice/Form one great lake of ecstatic liquid�. Not only can the reader envision the dance within this scene, but also feel its jubilation. Emotional descriptions such as this help to define Tracy K. Smith’s approach to visceral moments and expression as a whole.
Teachable Moments:
If you are looking for a range of works to study a poet’s oeuvre or want students to understand the range that is possible from a singular writer with great technical and linguistic skill, the whole text would be appropriate. Due to the way she navigates historical accounts and notable speeches, selections from this collection could also be used for cross curricular lessons in social studies. For a writing or literature course lacking modern examples, Smith has poems that exemplify classic forms including erasure, villanelle, ghazal as well as those mentioned in the main review. Perspective (speaker), structure, and specificity are all elements for students to analyze or use as a model for their own work.
I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers; all opinions are my own.
As a whole, this collection traces Smith’s stirrings and awakenings as an author into a singular text. Juxtaposing different points in the writer’s career allows the reader to see the breadth of her work and examine how she both grows as a poet and experiments as a writer over the years. Pieces from The Body’s Question are very experiential, looking to specific moments through the lens of specific emotions that emanate from each situation. The predominant sense in this section is of longing in its assorted shades and contexts. The poems from Duende navigate otherness by giving voice to Ugandan wives gifted to rebel commanders, a child killer justifying their crime, and Native American children taken from their homes. Selections from Life On Mars are more esoteric and less engaging for poetry dabblers as Smith expands into space linguistically and topically, then returns to Earth with examination of human atrocities from differing perspectives. Wade in the Water poems show a range of focus from faith and God to the mistreatment of the planet and its people, African American people in particular. There are some truly thought provoking methods and concepts in this part of the collection for readers to contemplate. Riot is where Smith rewards longtime fans with new works and new forms including found poems, palindromes, and epistolary poems. Each of these new works exudes her strengths as a master of concept and craft.
Tracy K. Smith is unafraid to explore varied perspectives in her poetry. In “Theft�, she speaks from the perspective of a Native American child taken away from tribe and family and into foster care with other children, she writes, “Each in his own/Now.I have never/Thought to cross from mine to theirs,/But I’ve held my hand inches/From my brother’s back and felt/His heat�. There is such solitude and longing expressed in these lines that the reader can truly connect with the sentiment of the speaker. Later, Smith channels a Daughter of the Confederacy from 1915 as hissing, “Let the silence of threat embolden our approach� (“Suggestion�). The range of voices at times creates discomfort and always necessitates confrontation with the truth of the poem. The level of specificity within each piece makes the world tactile. In “Serenade�, she describes, “I am spinning/So giddily the bottles of beer and liquor and the bags bereft of their ice/Form one great lake of ecstatic liquid�. Not only can the reader envision the dance within this scene, but also feel its jubilation. Emotional descriptions such as this help to define Tracy K. Smith’s approach to visceral moments and expression as a whole.
Teachable Moments:
If you are looking for a range of works to study a poet’s oeuvre or want students to understand the range that is possible from a singular writer with great technical and linguistic skill, the whole text would be appropriate. Due to the way she navigates historical accounts and notable speeches, selections from this collection could also be used for cross curricular lessons in social studies. For a writing or literature course lacking modern examples, Smith has poems that exemplify classic forms including erasure, villanelle, ghazal as well as those mentioned in the main review. Perspective (speaker), structure, and specificity are all elements for students to analyze or use as a model for their own work.
I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers; all opinions are my own.
November 19, 2022
‘The Machinery of Evening,� the title is so great and the poem even better in its sexiness and the animal uncertainties that come with the certainty of darkness. It contains this line, ‘in the Cineplex of the mind� which means nothing more than dreaming in the context of this poem and yet Smith’s willingness to give color, flash and desire to dreams in the way that movies do makes all the difference. Dreaming can be so mundane but not these dreams, these are vivid and full of beguiling imagery all because she unleashed the word ‘Cineplex� in her poem at the right moment.
Another but different type of poem is ‘It’s Not,� about grieving the death of her father. Here she uses the metaphor of swimming which is arresting because it seems so strangely positioned along with death. Yet when we live in water we are in another reality and yet are very much alive. The idea of a dead man vigorous enough to swim through his new reality where he feels alive to his child, connects her back to his formerly real white haired self.
Then there is the stark, plain, majestic, gut-wrenching ‘I will tell you the truth about this, I will tell you about it� which is based on the letters newly freed slaves wrote as the Civil War ended asking so simply and powerful only for what is rightly theirs. These people’s strength, clarity and integrity cuts against all the white fragility that springs up out of nothing but pure guilt and defensiveness. I can hear someone claiming these aren’t poems but historical documents exploited for poetic purposes. It’s too bad that I can so quickly access my own white fragility. Fortunately, the weight of this poem overwhelms that other instinctive, privileged voice. Maybe its good that I recognize it and me for still being here after all these years.
When I finished this collection, I felt strangely dissatisfied. I feel like I need to read each of these separate collections and fully marinate in the poetic power and perspective shifting brilliance of Tracy K. Smith.
Another but different type of poem is ‘It’s Not,� about grieving the death of her father. Here she uses the metaphor of swimming which is arresting because it seems so strangely positioned along with death. Yet when we live in water we are in another reality and yet are very much alive. The idea of a dead man vigorous enough to swim through his new reality where he feels alive to his child, connects her back to his formerly real white haired self.
Then there is the stark, plain, majestic, gut-wrenching ‘I will tell you the truth about this, I will tell you about it� which is based on the letters newly freed slaves wrote as the Civil War ended asking so simply and powerful only for what is rightly theirs. These people’s strength, clarity and integrity cuts against all the white fragility that springs up out of nothing but pure guilt and defensiveness. I can hear someone claiming these aren’t poems but historical documents exploited for poetic purposes. It’s too bad that I can so quickly access my own white fragility. Fortunately, the weight of this poem overwhelms that other instinctive, privileged voice. Maybe its good that I recognize it and me for still being here after all these years.
When I finished this collection, I felt strangely dissatisfied. I feel like I need to read each of these separate collections and fully marinate in the poetic power and perspective shifting brilliance of Tracy K. Smith.
March 6, 2022
This volume is divided into five parts:
* poems from
* poems from
* poems from
* poems from
* new poems (this section is titled Riot
Since I'd already read - and LOVED - Deunde, Life on Mars, and Wade in the Water, I skipped ahead to Riot, and then went back to The Body's Question.
To my surprise, the new stuff didn't really grab me. I don't know why. They are good poems, but I loved Smith's previous collections so much, I was expecting amazing poems. But good poems are still good poems. I think my favorite from the new poetry was "Mothership."
* poems from
* poems from
* poems from
* poems from
* new poems (this section is titled Riot
Since I'd already read - and LOVED - Deunde, Life on Mars, and Wade in the Water, I skipped ahead to Riot, and then went back to The Body's Question.
To my surprise, the new stuff didn't really grab me. I don't know why. They are good poems, but I loved Smith's previous collections so much, I was expecting amazing poems. But good poems are still good poems. I think my favorite from the new poetry was "Mothership."
Mothership
You cannot see the Mothership in space,
It and She being made of the same thing.
All our mothers hover there in the ceaseless
blue-black, watching it ripple and dim
to the prized pale blue in which we spin�
we who are Black, and you, too. Our mothers
know each other there, fully and finally.
They see what some here see and call anomaly:
the way the sight of me might set off
a shiver in another mother’s son: a deadly
silent digging in: a stolid refusal to budge:
the viral urge to stake out what on solid ground
is Authority, and sometimes also Territory.
Our mothers, knowing better, call it Folly.
April 2, 2024
I did it! I spent the entire month of March only reading women. Life got in the way so I had to finish my month’s reading on April 1 and that’s no April Fools. My women’s history month for 2024 ended up with sixteen books and included biographies, memoirs, mysteries, Pulitzer winners, and everything else in between. I even read two poetry collections and thought it was appropriate to end the month with the work of former United States poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. I am not going to lie when I note that poetry is not my favorite genre to read. Yes, I enjoy Smith, Harjo, and Trethewey from time to time but I prefer meaty books to those with a few stanzas on the page. This takes nothing away from these gifted ladies, so much so, that I included work by all three in my March lineup. I am just not a connoisseur of poetry unless it is of the rhyming variety for kids. Smith is my favorite of the three. Such Color includes poems from her previous award winning collections as well as new work titled Riot. My preference is from her award winning Life on Mars when she quotes David Bowie and her modeling of Langston Hughes� classic work. Hughes is one of the few poets I enjoy reading at length so it comes as no surprise that Smith’s homage to him was my favorite of the entire collection. And on that note, women’s history month comes to an end. My goal for the rest of the year is 50/50 percent of male and female and authors, and I will see if I stick to it.
4 stars
4 stars
August 6, 2024
I have recently been alerted to the -- somewhat disputable-- fact that I am a bee. Which is a bit of "had to go all the way around the barn to come in the back door" kind of knowing; my brother called me Bee for the first two years of my life. (My name was hard for him to pronounce. Bee came from "bay-bee" which, I guess, is a word he was sick of hearing, what with all my then deformities, now 'congenital uniquities.')
"Bee on a Sill"
Submits to its own weight,
the bulb of itself too full,
too weak or two wise
to lift and go.
And something blunt in me
remembers the old charade
about putting a thing out
of its misery. For it? For me?
Sleep, Bee, deep and easy.
Hive, heave, give, grieve.
Then rise when you're ready
from your soul's hard floor
to sweet work
or some war.
"Bee on a Sill"
Submits to its own weight,
the bulb of itself too full,
too weak or two wise
to lift and go.
And something blunt in me
remembers the old charade
about putting a thing out
of its misery. For it? For me?
Sleep, Bee, deep and easy.
Hive, heave, give, grieve.
Then rise when you're ready
from your soul's hard floor
to sweet work
or some war.
Read
December 23, 2022Smith’s work has long been steeped in concern for the environment. Poems from her first 2003 collection, such as “Drought,� “Mangoes� and “Wintering,� were already conscious of the interplay between the human and non-human worlds, and by the time she published her 2007 collection, Smith’s “Words/ whittled and stretched into meaning.� Her 2018 book centers the toxicity of our environmental catastrophe at its core. And new poems in Such Color clarify that, for Smith, who has always attended to interplays between history, the present, and our threatened environments, “The Wave after Wave is One Wave Never Tiring.�
Review published originally with Orion Magazine:
Review published originally with Orion Magazine:
August 5, 2023
It's really hard to rank poetry (I don't really feel up to it). But some of the poems here are simply breathtaking. Smith's writing is powerful and pointed. After one poem ("The Elephant in the Poem"), I simply wrote, "Wow!" Her poem "Declaration," an erasure of the Declaration of Independence, has stuck with me for years, and it's one of the most power pieces of writing I can remember. This volume collects highlights from her four previously published books and also includes eighteen new poems. Since I didn't have any of her previous books, it was an ideal place to start. If you dabble (or dive deep) in poetry, I recommend giving Smith a try.
July 31, 2021
I Sit Outside in Low Late-Afternoon Light to Feel Earth Call to Me
Is the world intended for me? Not just me but
The we that fills me? Our shadows reel and dart.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The world has never had—will never have—our backs?
The world has never had—will never have—our backs.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The we that fills me, our shadows real and dark,
Is the world intended for me?
Is the world intended for me? Not just me but
The we that fills me? Our shadows reel and dart.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The world has never had—will never have—our backs?
The world has never had—will never have—our backs.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The we that fills me, our shadows real and dark,
Is the world intended for me?
November 20, 2023
Tracy K. Smith is immensely talented. I really enjoyed getting to read the poems from Life on Mars, and many of those remain my favorites, but I found new favorites too such as “Slow Burn� and “Wade in the Water.� What most compels me about Smith’s poetry is her use of imagery. She really pulls you into a scene which is lovely. Definitely a poet that people can approach from all levels of experience.
February 26, 2023
I checked this volume out of a library because I wanted to read only the newest poems. I have read previously the older poems. I even teach the Life on Mars collection. The new poems in this volume are good, though I wish there were more of them. If anyone has not read Smith's poetry before, this is a good selection.
October 24, 2021
A dazzling collection of poems that feel urgent and relevant, whether from Smith's work in 2003 or written this year. She brings to life migrants, Black Civil War veterans, factory workers poisoned by chemicals, travelers and so much more. Her verse is simple yet elegant, evocative and fresh.
Read
April 23, 2022I've enjoyed Smith's poems everywhere I've encountered them, so I was surprised that this collection didn't resonate with me as much as I expected it to. Maybe I've been more exposed to her more recent work.
August 14, 2022
I hadn’t read any of Tracy Smith’s work before, and this was a lovely introduction, collecting poems from all her previous books with some new stuff. I especially love her skill in evoking place, whether the place in question is Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia, Chicago, or the Texas Hill Country.
September 4, 2022
Beautifully written � nice collection� I previously read some of her work� it was great to pick and choose but actually read most again. Love the new work!
Every poem tells a story. Most invoke a visual story!
Every poem tells a story. Most invoke a visual story!
January 2, 2023
I’m going to have to revisit this collection. Unfortunately, little stuck with me or made an impression. However, I don’t feel this is a fault of the writer but more so my own feelings of detachment from her writing style.
April 22, 2023
Reading and enjoying poetry have a lot to do with timing. The time wasn't right for me and this collection. Did I "like" the poems I did read? Yes. No. Tough topics. Lots to think about. I hope to circle back some day and finish it.
did-not-finish
May 6, 2023This author just doesn’t work for me. My second attempt at reading their work that I didn’t enjoy. I DNF’d after the first few poems and skimming beyond that. I wish I could explain why I don’t feel connected to this poet. I wish I did.
July 8, 2023
This is a book to ponder either daily, or when you are able to sit about appreciating words.
Poetry is oil for loosening your stiffness, food for the soul, a quick look at a powerful message to ponder.
Poetry is oil for loosening your stiffness, food for the soul, a quick look at a powerful message to ponder.
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