Cumberland Station is Dave Smith's fourth volume in six years—a puffing record. Yet running on passionately in an innocence of imprecision it stumbles with a beginner's mistakes. Take the lineation: the lines either lay out a clause matter-of-factly or enjamb with a dull thick halt, like chalk on a wet blackboard…. The line-breaks may even work against the sense, to no evident purpose, as in "But that's not prayer. Maybe it is / not even hope…." The poems churn on almost like prose, without lingering delicacies of ear. Their movement at best is but loosely interpretive, conveying a pell-mell pained objection to our "lost and wondering" lives.

Still, the writing lacks the precision of good prose. A certain imaginative tentativeness may be essential to poetry, but often Smith gives us muddle instead. His picture-making faculty is too little self-critical. "One stunningly / soft face in my brain's room stands up" is visually preposterous; and do brains seem to have rooms, let alone a single one? The similes wander in woozily. "Like purple dreams / graven on cold cell walls," Smith writes in a poem on fishing…. And so on … from muzziness up to looseness, that is Smith's usual range.

Astonishing all the same that a potentiality for greatness booms like a waterfall at the back of these poems. Smith's sensibility, Whitmanian in its ardor, has a fact-gathering, fact-hurtling force. It is excited and chiefly what excites it is the painful evidence of life's wreckage. Smith is one of those—like James Agee and Philip Levine—who recognize (in Agee's words) "the ultimately mortal wound which is living" and who venerate "the indignant strength not to perish." Into left-behind railway stations and baitshacks, into factories, farms, truck stops, shipyards he enters with immense love and respect and a total poverty of comfort or hope. This is Whitman in a failure of the sun, in unrelieved fellow-suffering.

Disregard the passionate humanity of the position and you can see quite coldly its emotional resources for poetry. Shared anguish, admired toughness, ecstasies of confused identification (as in "Blues for Benny Kid Paret"), a loyal infinitely delicate sense of continuity with the fathers, including poets, as in "and Roethke in his green war / gone like Whitman, bulldozed / like the secret river of the soul, but not ended, only / diverted, carving new banks"—these for a start. And indignation, bitterness, fury; wholesale indictments of the trouthating executives of Buick, politically simple burning complaints against working conditions…. There is still more in Smith—a sense of "facts / wind-worn and useless," of stripped-down truth ("Every face in this land knows what a lie is"), of dead-ending ("Sometimes I lie like that all morning and whisper to / snow scratching the walls"); this charged in the same solution with excitement over the acute and cooing life of poetry, and over vital battles, as well as the megalomania of spring ("Today I do not believe / a single sparrow will die but I will croak back his life"). He has center and weight but is complex and he moves.

Yet how well can he command this large, resonant instrument of feeling? This much can be said, that he has enough sensitive power to arrest and touch you, as in "How to Get to Green Springs," "The Luminosity of Life," "Cumberland Station," "Drunks," "The Testimony of Wine," and "Sailing the Back Water" (among others). He makes his impression even through ripples of imprecision, like fists seen pressed against a rainmisted window. (pp. 123-25)

What a poet we would have should Smith develop a passionate desire for accuracy. At present he may suppose that a populist poetry must chew off and spit out exquisiteness. But "Sailing the Back River" shows the contrary, the humanity possible in a painstaking eloquence. Poetry after all is a weapon against dumb silence and tangled complexity and needs a bright hard honed edge. (p. 126)