Devotions

Starred review from March 21, 2011
Smith's energetic, muscular and all-around superb sixth collection appears to contain almost everything. The onrushing poems in long-lined free verse, long sentences and longer lists address the most intimate subjectsâ"the faces of all those you love while you're loving/ the one you love"âalong with the most far-flung: his book throws down an almost Whitmanesque challenge to anyone who says that present-day poetry cannot see America whole. As in earlier books, Smith (Songs for Two Voices) does well by the grittier, and the more macho, people and things of these States, such as "an ex-con... on parole, careful to defer to the pushy,/ the striving, the vaulting who have inherited the earth since his send up/ for his crimes." Several pages look with a hard tenderness at townscapes and people of the old industrial heartland, from the pollution, corruption, and rock and roll clubs of 1980s Providence, R.I., to present-day Syracuse, N.Y. (where Smith teaches). But he is never narrow, nor single-minded: global climate change and the scope of all history ("We were the infinite apes at infinite keyboards"), the sonnet and the history of sonnets, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, 9/11, a Chinese restaurant in Alabama, high school shop class, maternal elegy, Pindaric ode, and stellar astronomy all light up at least a page. Smith is consistently more ambitious than most of his peers.

March 15, 2011
Smith is a respected, award-winning poet with four previous collections. Devotion is a worn word, an excess of meaning dulling its essence. Yet Smith titled his new book Devotions, recalling a religious definition, a form of worship, for private use. Smiths poems interrogate the meaning of form, worship, private, useevery crucial word. Nearly all the poems are closely observed blocks of free-associative free verse. The best are confident solos for alto sax or voice. The high notes sound like this: The stars like sweat / on a boxers skin. And this: Halfway between a wheelbarrow of dirt and a facsimile machine / is beauty. The operation of these images, seeing the inhuman in the human and ideas in things, becomes through repetition a critique of culture. The excess of significance we cede to things and ideals grants them power over us. Smith riffs on film, cooking, physics, Laundromats, baseball, Rimbaud, and more. His devotions are authoritative and capacious. Neither querulous nor slavish, they give pleasure, which is what we ask of them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)