Review by New York Times Review
The quiet rural boys and men of Smith's poems want neither colorful escape nor radical transformation, though their hard lives speak to our social system too: They have "lived far from everywhere / And any toy, no matter how small, could still / Fill the empty hours." They want to make do, get by, as disillusioned adults, and they find it harder than it should be, in part because farm life has always been hard, in part because much of America does not see, or does not want to see, them. A "flock of decoys" provides false reassurance to ducks; "Hired hands of my grandfather's time," now ghosts, "come floating / Through the doorframes of meth / Houses on the verge of exploding." Smith does not often (or not for an entire poem's length) adopt pre-modern meters or forms, but his careful sonic patterns suggest an immersion in them, as when the men (perhaps veterans) in "Wounded Men Seldom Come Home to Die" become "fireflies in a Mason jar, / Holes punched in the tin lid so they can breathe." Weldon Kees, Donald Justice and, behind them, Robert Frost constitute the tradition in which Smith works, and in his hands it is political, even topical, not so much in the few poems that address headlines ("Drone") as everywhere else, in allegories, character sketches, vignettes: a "Cat Moving Kittens" "made a decision / Any mother might make / Upon guessing the intentions / Of the state: to go and to / Go now, taking everything / You love between your teeth."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Smith (Almanac , 2013) readily draws, again, on his experience growing up on a dairy farm in Illinois, from teenagers clowning around in cornfields to the steadfast landscapes of windbreaks and hunting blinds and a dozen haiku found scribbled in The Old Farmer's Almanac: 1957 ( Alone with his father, / The boy fishes / With a bare hook ). But Smith also enriches familiar images with strange complexity: an otherwise unremarkable barn bears a circus-act-like outline of knives in the shape of a woman, a metal scrapper laments the underwater wreckage of a tragic car crash he can't salvage, and a poem ostensibly about grasshoppers ends by evoking a foiled suicide bombing. Smith continues an exploration of more overtly political aspects in some of the book's best poems, including That Particular Village, a quip attributed to Donald Rumsfeld after U.S. forces killed nearly 100 civilians in an Afghan farming village in 2002. Amid the lamentations of war and midwestern reveries, Smith fashions fabulously striking images ( Dust mites drifting like plankton / Through the baleen of the sunbeams ) that sustain the breadth of this generous collection.--Diego Báez Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
In this heartland journey, former Wallace Stegner Fellow Smith takes us along deer paths and cattle trails, tumbling into cornfields, and by barbed-wire fences that "clarify the prairie." Elegantly delivered though these portraits may be, they aren't just pretty pastorals. Travelers are told "Don't trust the bullet-riddled signs," boys recall the spooky story of a lad lost forever among the cornstalks, and oak saplings "sensed the wire tapping/ their bodies.// Until they began to believe/ they needed it/ In order to stand." Smith capably sees deeper meaning or darker substance where rural steadiness might lull, but he's never self-consciously showy. Poems about a bullied child or the neighbor taunted as a vampire ("the poor man probably just worked third-shift/ at Honeywell") quietly state their business, and the invidious effect of living near the glue factory is summed up thus: "You knew horses/ were what hung the gold and silver/ stars in the firmament of your notebook." VERDICT Charming work for many readers. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
