Poetry Book Review: “LIFE ON MARS” by Tracy K. Smith
Click here for your copy of Tracy K. Smith's "Life On Mars".
Many readers may find it necessary to read this book more than once – both for understanding and just because they want to read it again.
It almost seems at times that Tracy Smith’s work in “LIFE ON MARS” Is written for an audience in another time. References to rock star David Bowie, for example, might seem more at home in the 1990’s than on the threshold of the teens in this century; and surely within the decade even the great Hubble Telescope will send many readers clicking for Wiki. Yet at other times the poet’s sensual imagery and metaphors that stretch the reader’s imagination like Gumby in the ungentle hands of two nine-year-olds (or beauty in the eyes of love) are timeless.
The poet’s masterful slant rhymes made me smile every time. The poem, “EGGS NORWEGIAN” turns on a dime so fast I was left breathless. I found it fascinating that the title poem, “LIFE ON MARS”, actually a set of nine poems, is the most disturbing in the collection, full of dark images brewed from the bitterest dregs of news from around the world. The following two lines, I believe, epitomize the sentiment of the poem:
“… How else could we get things so wrong / Like a story hacked to bits…”
Perhaps the most finely crafted poem – actually seven poems, the poem seeming to reinvent itself on each consecutive page – is “THE SPEED OF BELIEF”, Tracy Smith’s elegy for her father, Floyd William Smith. I can imagine it written slowly and carefully over a period of months. It has the feel of being unedited, written in a sure, slow hand.
“… and who were we / Without your clean profile nicking away / At anything that made us afraid?”
The timeless aspect of the works in this collection is the feelings that are conveyed in a way that only well written poetry can convey. For this reason I predict that centuries from now, if there are readers, they will read this work without worrying about obscure historical references, because the conveyance of feeling alone will be strong enough to move them. I guess time will tell.
“LIFE ON MARS” by Tracy K. Smith, pub. 2011 Graywolf Press