Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990 TAG: 9004150316
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by Dan Gribbin
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Twenty or 30 pages into "Cuba Night," I'm settled in, ready for action after the feints and footwork of the early rounds. Echoes of dustjacket hype are dying down - the ring announcer's adenoidal drone. The poet's voice is taking over, coaxing me toward the shadows of the past.
"Against the back wall startled wings beat,
Noting our presence, stirring the rich silts
of a world that lives without us, the silence
unmocked by our loud crying out. In a frieze
of webs a shadow moves and we feel ourselves
placed in shafts of light, trespassers driven
from desire to fear in this abandoned barn.
are we here? we ask aloud, as if the dead
wood knows, unimpeachable as nests of swallows."
This is a poem entitled "Pillage." Long before I read Dave Smith I knew that feeling. He knew it long before he wrote the poem. There a world that lives without us, a world which might be much better off without us. Mostly, we evade such thoughts. Dave Smith can pull us out of those evasions. Dave Smith can sneak us into rotting barns.
Loud praise seems out of place around this poetry. Is Dave Smith really Robert Lowell incarnate? The modern Goya? The South's greatest poet yet?
What I can honestly say is that I reached a point, with "Cuba Night," where I was reading back through the poems twice to re-experience their richness. No reviewer wants to catch himself doing that sort of thing. It simply takes too much time. You did it to me, Dave. I became an engaged reader. I went positively over your book.
The past is everywhere in "Cuba Night," but the past of "Cuba Night" is not the past of memory dusted soft. It is the past ever present, the past suffered from and suffered through, the past present, in the odd moment of solitude, by the boy cautioned to look away from the welder's light who disobeys and stares. ("Welder.")
The final poem in the collection, "Southern Crescent," is masterful. Smith tricks out what can be tricked out by language, images fascinating even as they repel. He does this while showing the good artistic sense to leave the aura of mystery surrounding a painful event intact. "It seemed enough," the speaker in the poem states simply.
We don't have to read twice to understand.
by CNB