Dave Smith, in Goshawk, Antelope, uses the elements of tribal unification, but ironically, admitting that they have been disenchanted. In particular, he takes over the totem, that figure which compounds the subhuman, the human, and the divine. In the title poem, he maintains a delicate balance between a playful and serious use of totemic imagery by emphasizing the tension between the polar terms of his metaphors, and the work of imagination in devising them. The goshawk and antelope, male and female principles, both are Smith's father and mother and are not: for how could such alien creatures be kin? The goshawk, for instance, is first presented as entirely Other, in a setting which is at once actual and a landscape of memory, the intense sunlight, long hours of driving, and some past trouble inducing Smith's double vision…. (pp. 301-02)

Memory and present vision move closer and closer as the poem progresses, until at the end they are wholly superimposed:

  the accusing goshawk face of my father in that dark room
  where I walked too late, where the glowing fur-tufts
  of candle shadows drift on her face and his
 
  and what was held has become, suddenly, lost like breath.

We can accept the totemic identification because it has been prepared so carefully in the poem. The wilderness converges on the poet; the poet's mind is also a wilderness where all his history converges on one moment, in which the totem names, if it does not dissolve, the mystery which drives the poem to its conclusion.

Again and again, Smith holds up the human to the nonhuman world, complicating the mirror-images with an ineluctable sense of alientation…. My only reservation about Smith's poetry is its obscurity, which must partly be due to the enormous difficulty of the themes he has chosen to address, and his refusal to treat them in any simple fashion; still, a poet's failure to communicate is no better than silence. (p. 302)