I am trying to decide what they feel when they wake upĪnd discover my body is near. In “Song,” she writes of a lover’s hands: For Smith, it seems that perhaps a barrier between the intimate and the universal doesn’t exist-there is a complex pain induced by both seeing a lover’s dead wife in a picture frame and the beauty of space, a particular kind of human longing that can be measured by a desire for eggs in the morning. When we do, we are thrilled by her disruptions of our expectations. Through Smith’s descriptions, we have access to new images of our planet “ticking with mines,” can experience “The Universe as Primal Scream” through an infant screaming through an apartment wall as though reaching for the moment when “the whole building will lift off, and we’ll ride into glory like Elijah.” And Smith doesn’t expect us to simply take her word for it-the book is full of entreaties to join her in her observations and grappling. To call Smith meditative is true, of course, and this book is at its basis a powerful elegy for her father her voice also has a note of prophetic vision. Perhaps it is this incredible breadth that impresses me the most in this text: Smith guides us from upstairs hallway to stars with the same authoritative gaze, which at once wonders at and accepts all of the component parts. My experience reading the book was such that it’s hard to know where to start-with the elegant unraveling of sentences, the daring scope that encompasses the intimate and universal, the precision of description. Life on Mars is Smith’s third collection, following Duende and The Body’s Question (both from Graywolf). last spring, and now can add, too, the immense pleasure of encountering her word on the page. I had the pleasure of seeing Smith read with the Dark Room Collective in D.C. Smith’s Life on Mars( Graywolf), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Shamefully, I have only just now discovered Tracy K.
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