WAKING BEFORE DAWN
by
Thomas R. Smith
Red Dragonfly Press
Red
Paper, 89 pages, $18
ISBN 10: 1-890193-67-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-890193-67-6
Like many fine poets, Thomas Smith has been writing for years, off the stage of the literary establishment. The author of seven other collections of poetry, Smith writes with words that turn your head with their plain-spoken eloquence. In Waking Before Dawn, he quietly but insistently protests the Iraq War, and writes moving elegies for John Lennon, Senator Wellstone, William Stafford, Allen Ginsburg, and a poet who never walked near the literary stage Tom Gardner. But none of these are Smith s best work. Where his poetry shines brightest is in the first two-dozen or so poems of this collection, such as Trust, where Smith defines how our faith in what should happen often is enough to sustain us:
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees,
and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at
the right place.
In Your Inner Face, Smith demonstrates how we show one face to most of the world, while revealing an inner face to only a few and how, when two people glimpse it in each other, we call that love.
In Day of Rest, we see inside the power of the one day of the week in which we seek shelter from work, how the Sabbath can renew us, and how, in one bedroom in one farmhouse, seemingly isolated from the outside world, the world devolves to the life of two people committed to one another for life and beyond:
My hand reaches through stopped time toward
the shimmer of your
breasts, promise older
than the world, in this
house whose walls are
flying away from us at
the speed of light.
What is most striking about Smith s work is his willingness to open his arms to what is good and best in life, as in Krista Fifty, where he does not bemoan the advent of age, but sings instead: I love your laughter, red as a basket / of strawberries. Few of us can take a moment of such pleasant insight and capture it the way Smith does. It s not that he doesn t see the dust on our shoes from the journey down a long road he does but he also finds the sparkle in a moment we too often overlook. Consider A Wedding Poem, where a young man and woman commit their vows, and where each person in attendance becomes again handsome in them, beautiful in them, renewed by the promise of youth and love.
When it comes to age and mortality, Smith is no innocent. In The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James, he sets forth our common hope that we ll be the one to sing down the silence, even as we know full well we cannot escape the static with which time loves to stopper the dark jar of the song.
If one poem can mark the spirit of one poet, the essential spirit of Smith shines like a light in the brief two-quatrain poem In Orchard Country. There, after a farmhouse burns to the cellar-stones, the fruit-pickers find something extraordinary in the new day that follows:
The next day we found near the ruin,
still warm, a tree hung
with baked apples. And so,
after a night too close
to the fire, a poet
may hold something delicious
in a scorched hand.
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