For Appearances: Poems

by Jordan Smith

Jordan Smith's For Appearances charts a territory of loyalty, affection, and loss. Written out of the rural rust-belt vernacular of the American landscape, these poems deal with the allegiances and attritions of family, culture, history and friendship. Their sensibility ranges from the heartfelt local color of fiddle tunes and the country taverns to the heady dream of matching wits with Christopher Marlowe and the driven narrative of a resentful boy who flees adoption by the Shakers. These poems stretch impressively across an American terrain of thought and feeling often disguised by appearances. From a hitchhiker's back roads to a woman living through Bill Monroe's "True Life Blues" to an acquaintance who dies while working at a shelter for the homeless, Smith's search is for the singular music -- "a crooked tune," a fiddler might call it -- that's found at the intersection of place and spirit.

79 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, most recently “Little Black Train,” winner of the Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, a book of dark Americana and particular pleasures, and "Clare's Empire" (published by The Hydroelectric Press), a fantasia on the life and work of English poet, John Clare, which deals with class and environment, poetry and madness, economy and profligacy, beauty and vulgarity. The subjects of his previous collections range from the landscape of the Mohawk Valley, to fiddle tunes and old time string bands, to fathers and sons, to opera, to rat cheese and ale, to movies, to fishing, to ladies mandolin societies, to the Beats, to cornet solos in a town park gazebo, to the track at Saratoga Springs. Sandra MacPherson wrote about his work that "the Americana seems so throughly a part of these poems, so integrated with their metaphysics, that it's good for the soul." He lives in upstate New York, where he is Edward E. Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.