With respect to pure verbal energy, the basic ability and desire to write, Dave Smith has to be among the most talented poets we have. It isn't just the amount of poetry he has produced … but the range evident everywhere in that body of work. He began as a precocious expert in the plain style, and has evolved into something almost as different from that as it is possible to be—master of the flowing, meditative, complicated, descriptive narrative of the ongoing flux. Along with its rewards, richness has its dangers; Smith is such a natural writer, and produces so much, that we may be in danger of losing our sense of who and where he is. The problem is exacerbated by this new collection. Till now, Smith has written mostly from the Virginia tidewater background we know to be his, from the life we see he has lived as citizen, traveler, poet, and teacher; all this primarily personal and sincere. But in Goshawk, Antelope, he has turned fabulator; the speaker of this volume grew up in the West, in Wyoming, and is living in Utah now; he tells us a story of his life, of the images that obsess him. It would be naïve and irrelevant to ask who this character is; instead we must wonder to what extent he has possessed this land, its language.

The Western style [of others] is sparse, plain, almost prosaic…. By contrast, Dave Smith retains his Southern roots—his style is lush, rich, full, his rhythms as expansive as those of James Dickey. At its heart, Goshawk, Antelope embodies a lack of correlation between style and content. The closer we look, the more inevitably Southern these poems appear to be, no matter their locale: the Western poem is descriptive, with a relatively simple abstract point, lesson, moral, woven into its texture; Smith's poems are loose ruminations that embody description almost as an afterthought. (pp. 207-08)

One result of this style is narrative obscurity. Perhaps it does not really matter what is happening in these poems; but they are mostly based on a story line of one sort or another, so the question does come up. Again the contrast with the earlier work is striking—the poems in The Fisherman's Whore and Cumberland Station are narrative, clearly so, and whatever point is made grows out of the story; in Goshawk, Antelope the reverse is more likely to be true. (p. 208)

What makes one hesitate about this book is what looks like an inherent glibness in the poet—it may be too easy for him to sing—coupled with too strong an ability to absorb and emulate the voices that impress him. The result is a strange hybrid, Western life and landscape rendered in a lush Southern style. Beyond this, however, we can recognize many strengths. Smith is at his best here when using an external image to reveal, comment on, an inner state. "Antelope Standing, Some Lying" concerns a man for whom the sight of these animals calls up feelings of mortality…. This is extraordinary writing; the lines subtly incorporate dark intimations while building to an unsettling sense of terror…. Memory is evocative in [the lines of this poem]—the sight of the antelope on the hillside brings back the sight of the women on the hillside—and thus the scene is bathed in feelings of mortality. Little wonder that the dreamed antelope at the end should seem harbingers of the thinker's own death. I cannot imagine any change that could improve this excellent poem. Dave Smith is a pure and natural writer. I regret that he gave up the ambitious project of his earlier books, to render the texture of his native area into verse, but perhaps it had become an albatross for him. He strikes me as a poet in the midst of a change, occasioned at least in part by his own relocation to the West. Given the strength of his talent, the varied music he has already made, we can confidently expect him to emerge into another strong vein. (pp. 208-10)