Customer Reviews

Word Comix: Poems

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I've only read one poem from this book, so why review it? The poem I read was in a review absolutely trashing Smith, yet while the critic was fisking the poem (taking it apart line by line) I was slowly realizing, "I want to read more of this. She doesn't get it at all." Since her review was just picked up by the Arts and Letters Daily, and will be read all over the Anglophone world by morning, thought I should register my dissent. Reviewer underestimated, for instance, "A softness in your wife's face/reminding you of something/ you thought you'd never forget." It's not about the "something," it's about realizing, during the long erosion of married life, that you did forget what you once had assumed unforgettable. I've been reading Smith online tonight. I am more into Auden than his genre, but I respect the way Smith revives what used to be called "verse," and gives us in thirty seconds experiences a short story writer would need half an hour to produce. (And the verse is therefore more intense than the story.) The title poem of Smith's book, Heroin, is even more impressive. Halfway through, he shifts diction, shifts to a different level of imagery, so that you feel the way the heroin used to hit him. It scared me as much as those surreal scenes in Trainspotting. Like that great film, it was drugs without the showing off, self pity, or sneaking pride. I want to read more.