Dave Smith's Cumberland Station is full up, pent-up, over-flowing with poetry. He has a world to report, sometimes a world of miners, fishermen and other hard workers, much of it remembered from Virginia and nearby. He has the language—itself brimming with particulars and good, pushy verbs. He can sing and tell stories, and he can do both at once. He has energy and power. He may even have vision. He takes risks in every direction, and dares to be outrageous, as in the ending of "Driving Home in the Breaking Season."…

  Damn death. Today I do not believe
  a single sparrow will die but I will croak back his life.
                                                (pp. 53-4)

It seems to me a brave aesthetic, which only a poet of Smith's astonishing energy, lush language, and vivid recall could hope to work beyond breathlessness and memory into vision and some ideas. But he is not foremost a poet of ideas, but of feelings. The momentum of his longer poems calls to mind the earlier poems of James Dickey; his responses to towns, the poems of Richard Hugo; his attitude toward hard-bitten memory, those of James Wright; and his language, when it barrels, even something of Dylan Thomas. He is high-spirited, even in anger, and he indulges serious hi-jinks in lingo. He is passionate and sometimes thumping. When he fails, he goes down in flames, a victim of overkill and volume. (p. 54)