Everything seems at first far away, then immediately close by-which is the experience of grief, reified in the poem. The perspective’s nearly simultaneous expansion (“I know you are far, infinitely far from us”) and magnification (“a frenzy of ants”) is a typical gesture from Smith, though performed so subtly here and so well that one feels, while reading these lines, a smooth acceleration of vision similar to the last few minutes on an airplane as it descends to the runway. The language here-both the diction and syntax-is plain, direct, and as a result, powerful. Wanting to help, to pick up the crumb and put it downĬlose to their hill, seeing their purpose that clearly

In the way one of us might pause a moment to watch a frenzy of ants, I know you are far, infinitely far from us. Walking up my steps in the dark, digging for the mail and my keys, The first is a personally elegiac mode, the second a broader-reaching sympathy for marginalized voices that are usually unheard or omitted from the record.Īs is the case with most young poets, Smith’s earlier poems are at their best in the more personal mode, as she is here in this moving elegy for her mother found in The Body’s Question, her first book: Reading it, I was impressed by how immediately Smith seemed to locate the two modes of writing that would sustain her to this point. Smith has given her readers a generous selection of poems from her previous four books as well as eighteen new poems. In Such Color, her newest collection of poetry, Tracy K.

Life on mars tracy k smith poems