the impression of female passion from which he is cut off is so strong on the narrator of “Field Music” that he becomes a wild beast in his own eyes.

A quality of women that attracts Smith is the hope of which they are capable. The used girl in “The Soft Belly of the World” waits for her seducer to return, hoping thereby to free herself of the memory of what happened to her. Hope is what makes the widow in “Portrait of a Lady” try to withstand age and death by tending her flowers, despite all the weeds she has to pull. Hope raised to the level of enduring attraction in the woman in “James River Storm” is what keeps the narrator committed to his memories and his vision of their importance to him in the present.

Sex and the past often go together in Smith’s poetry, mostly in an unhappy way. The women in “The Pornography Box” are pictures. They are the source of lust in the narrator’s boyhood, and though he found such abstract women wonderful, they also encased him in a feeling of rot. “A Gold of Birds” associates a death-dealing hawk in the present with the first experience of sex. The mud in “Pond” reminds Smith of the sexual love of ancestors, while “Nekkid: Homage to Edgar Allan Poe” takes him back to the time when he was fourteen and his desire for women was full of terror. When he was seventeen, he was humiliated by the laughter of the man who caught him having sex with a girl, and it is this shame linked with sex that he remembers in “The Colors of Our Age: Pink and Black.” In the same vein, a girl causes him to fall when he is ice-skating in his youth; he bleeds, and avers as an adult that everyone has a bloody story to tell about youthful sex (“Skating”). Remembering when he was drafted, the narrator of “Men Drafted” places women at the core of young men’s sense of helplessness, for they wish for what they cannot reach in their condition, as though women have always expected an impossible strength from them. If “Wedding Song” insists that it is the impulsive feeling behind his early marriage that keeps that marriage alive now for the poet, the poem also emphasizes the pain of such a marriage.

Smith goes to the past not only to find out what death and love mean but also to define what poetry means to him. In general, pain is the source and goad of art, as “Ducking: After Maupassant” and “Snow Owl” reveal. The pain of parting from a known place, consigning it thus to the past, makes words the habitation of that place in “Leaving Town.” The pain of paradox occupies “The Roundhouse Voices,” in which the poet recalls his maverick boyhood, with its rules and lessons, and wonders how poetry and rebelliousness can accommodate each other. Smith says, furthermore, that poetry cannot fully capture the wildness of nature or the pain of composition but adds that it is akin to useful, earthy arts such as boat building and that it can reveal something of the elemental in life (“Rooster Smith’s Last Log Canoe”). For Smith, poetry is like an old boat maintained against the specious glamour of the present (“Boats”), and though poetry may repeat the bad news of the past in the present, it is still a message that needs to be delivered, perhaps as a warning meant to preserve life (“Messenger”). Smith continues the boat metaphor in “Elegy in an Abandoned Boatyard,” equating a verse-line to a keel-line and seeing poetry as effective an embodiment of the past as are old boats. Photography is another metaphor that Smith uses for poetry, especially photography’s limits. “The Perspective & Limits of Snapshots” suggests that the subject of poetry is the past, and therefore failure. “The Traveling Photographer: Circa 1880,” again locating art in the past, shows the artist confounded by his subjects in that he is forced to see life as it is, not as he might like it to be. The artist is compelled by this painful restriction not only to pursue his art but also to record the truth of its content.

Two things account for the popularity of Dave Smith’s work in the current mainstream of American poetry: his addiction to his own past (particularly his family experiences in it) and his fascination with rural settings. He is forceful in his treatment and use of both, though not unique. His work broods with a kind of elegant subtlety on its subjects, but this is not enough to set it apart from the homogeneous verse of his contemporaries, which features a by now forced nostalgia for nature. In addition, what real passion there is in Smith’s poetry tends to be weakened by overstatement. Many of his poems start with an unnecessary description of setting and go on simply to repeat his intention and conclusions. Such a strategy tends to drug rather than excite or renew the reader’s attention.