Wild Root

by Ken Smith

British poet Ken Smith's new collection, Wild Root, was shortlisted for the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize. In it we find more journeys, more borders, more strange encounters, more transactions in the trade of languages. Here his wanderings take him further and further out, among the wastelands of Eastern Europe after Communism, and again to North America, where his as-if counterpart Eddie lives his imaginary lives, among other kinless wanderers. East and West, the distances merge into each other, but on the way meet Suleyman the Magnificent. Meet Jeremiah Bethia Robinson, a man that was never any fun at breakfast. Meet the Hat.

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
(8) 1938-
(per Library of Congress)

also as see Ken Smith Wikipedia

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked Wild Root but I didn't love it. Smith is smart and his work is constructed pretty well and it really seems like he does his research when he's working on a historical piece (of which many of the poems in the collection are). I particularly enjoyed the poems in the beginning of the book like the Joy series and the "Poem to Which the Answer is No", "The Geography of Clouds", and "The Telephone Is In the Key of C". The historical poems were too prosy for me; a little too lacking in scintillating wordplay, even as they explored the logic of travel and of experience and of possibilities through a variety of different historical situations.

An example of the kind of thing that I stuck on with this book is the poem "The Great Hat Project" which was funny, I think, and interesting, but it was also a sort of endless movement of slightly confusing hat jokes which, at the core of it all, didn't quite seem to go where it seemed to want to. It was funny and I think it was meant to be, but if it was meant to be then it should have been funnier I think. A lot of the poems were in that sort of weird nowhere zone of emotion, even though I really liked the poems that I liked. Now, the particular weird space of the book does seem roughly in line with my experience of late 20th century British poetry, however I don't have a good enough background to be certain that my experience with it is indicative of the field. If you happen across a copy, check it out, but it's not near the top of my list of works.