Smith emerges in his new volume, "Goshawk, Antelope",… as a distinguished allegorist of human experience. The rich local color of the Virginia and Maryland sketches [in his earlier "Fisherman's Whore" and "Cumberland Station"] has been joined by local details from Utah … and a desolate Wyoming. The family (Smith's wife and three children, and shadowy parents and grandparents) continues to play a large part in the story. But these particularities are now subdued to looming shapes of universal fate and emotion.

Smith is torrential, impatient, exasperated. His language is theatrical, even melodramatic. His earlier masters are Hopkins, Whitman, Crane, and Thomas—poets whose temperatures, rarely temperate, become volcanic or icy at will. The "peaceable and healthy spirit" that Keats hoped to attain eludes such poets. They are outraged in pain or felled by ecstasy; at their most moderate, they are crucified by hope. It might be premature to expect from Smith, who is just thirty-seven, a calmer eye or a more ironic tone. He is an openhanded spender of language, fixing most characteristically on those moments of horror or excitement or rapture which in life demand no holding back, no irony, no mediating reflection. Of course, no poem can exist without mediation, and Smith's most estranged moments come in his consciousness of the gap between being and language. In a typical Smith poem (not, perhaps for that reason, necessarily one of the best), an extreme situation plunges us into extremity: a child is bitten in the face by a dog; he is taken to the hospital; eventually, he dies. Before he dies, he relives the terror of the dog's attack…. The fact that art—like religion, like medicine in this case—makes nothing happen sets Smith at teeth-grinding odds with his own vocation…. The counters that Smith opposes to "the wreckage of promise" are passion and hope—explicitly named but as explicitly doubted: "Passion, if you once believe in it, is a way of hope." Whether life is best considered in the agonized terms of its worst events is the question raised, often by Smith himself, throughout this book. (pp. 96, 99)

Many of Smith's poems assume the form of a passage from innocence to experience. Innocence is enunciable, but experience falls silent. An implicit paradox emerges: when the last innocence vanishes, there will be no more words. It is as if the poet had a stake in remaining to some degree the boy he was, the adolescent the boy became, the young man the adolescent became; if he does not, he will no longer be able to write. It is a peculiarly Romantic conviction that adulthood is inimical to expression and spontaneity, and no soil has been more fertile for it than a young country like America. Smith, who is all care in expression, can scarcely be said to hold this conviction consciously, yet the poems again and again suggest it. (p. 99)

The goshawk and antelope of Smith's title move through the book—the hawk predatory, paternal, talons stretched out in desire; the antelope mild, fleet, free. In the title poem, a goshawk plunges, "as shapeless as obsession," while the poet, imagining himself into the antelope, tries to "buck off whatever the air had sent down." The "aching wingless shoulders of the antelope" become linked with a mother's pain, obliquely caused by the father. The poet, fleeing like the antelope "from what was unseen and there, like the red print of a hand about to fall," wants to

                  see for once what had died
           out of my life but would never leave or
           come back as it had been
           like the slow growth of an antelope's legs into freedom
           and away from desire's black whirling dream.

Looking for what was, where it used to be, is the occupation of poets. (p. 100)

"Trying to understand" is one force that moves these poems, and Smith hurls himself repeatedly against recalcitrant mysteries. When he abandons direct battering, he takes to circuitous and dogged routes. Manifestation (the morning light, the look of the world) is what he is given; understanding and emotion are what he demands. The two possibilities he awaits are revelation (when manifestation meets understanding) and disgust (when it does not). (p. 101)

At his most truthful, Smith undoes his hopes almost as he utters them. When desire and hope overmaster vision, he risks sentimentality; when the hurling and the battering dominate reflection, he risks noisiness; when earnestness impels him, he risks explicitness. In syntactic momentum and surcharge of vocabulary, he risks excess; in ethical uprightness, he risks puritanism. He is Hebraic rather than Hellenic; flexibility and moderation are as foreign to his dour apocalypses as to his impelled communions. There are words that one would like, on first impulse, to forbid him: "love," "huge," "hungry," "joy," "fear," "hard," "memory," "kill," "dream," "longing," "boiling," "blood," "lost," "promise," "hope," "scream," "terror," "black," "naked," "dark," "wordless." He disarms our wish to censor his vocabulary by announcing that he knows his own repetitions….

Instead of avoiding those worn or too evident words, Smith will take them up, fling them on the page, force us to digest them anew in his contexts, trusting that they will take on a fresh meaning, or a reinforcement of their old meaning. (p. 102)

Smith's weight is unenlivened by humor, or self-mockery, or an easy urbanity; he is solemn, harsh, driven, obdurate, hungry for some guarantees—which he wants as much to create as to experience—of promises kept, love exchanged, hope confirmed. His bitter self-taste (as he names it from Hopkins) sits ill with his domestic yearnings. Since he is an accomplished watcher of inner states, he will write a changing poetry. He has come very far from his first, raw poems published in small chapbooks; the measure of the distance travelled is in part the measure of the talent. (p. 105)