Gulf: Poems (Volume 1)

by Cody Smith

Gulf is one part ode and one part elegy to Smith’s Louisiana. It is a book that, all at once, questions, praises, and eulegizes its muse. Smith’s poetry works to elevate people, places, and things that are often looked over as unpoetic. Trailers, pickups, catfish, menial labor thread through Gulf. But ultimately, the book revolves around family and home. It moves back and forth between innocence and experience, the idyllic and tragic. In Gulf, the past shapes the poet, yet the poet, through so much that has been lost, has little else to access a past other than memory. Ultimately, Gulf becomes a reckoning with memory. These poems are the work of a poet leaving and losing his home, his family, his way of life. But they are not merely past-centric. Loss is a centrifugal force, an inciting incident that leads to the question,what is on the other side? What is left of a state that every year falls farther into the Gulf of Mexico? What is left when the poet moves three thousand miles away? What is it like to come home? Can the poet come home? What remains when the poet leaves? What is he able to bring with him? Though Smith’s relationship to his home is not simple, his first urge is to praise; however, when home is a trailer on wheels in a state that continues to fall down farther into water, Gulf is a book of poems unable to escape the elegiac.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2019

Reviews

[Tori Thurmond · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book encapsulates what it’s like to move away from the south and long for it. Smith beautifully articulates how the land can become a part of who a person is.

[coco's reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful collection, by far my favorite of the poetry I've read in the last year. Perhaps because I'm from Mississippi and know many of the places and themes Smith uses, but I connected to Gulf in a way I haven't yet with any other collection. If I had to complain about one thing, I don't particularly like how similar and repetitive the titles are.

A person works all their life to put their name onto something:
sometimes a mailbox, a business card, a bible, sometimes a shirt.

Those days passing through us
were just a fading bruise a rifle kicked into my shoulder.

[Shawna Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this lush, gritty, moving collection, and I'm already looking forward to Smith's next book. "...I wanted to tell him, Papaw, these lines become hard rows/ to hoe, that I'd trade all the words I've planted in these poems/ for and about people who'll never read them, to work/ his land, those acres I will not inherit." So many treasures here and every single one will tear your heart out (in the best way)...

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cody Smith’s work celebrates and mourns the presence of Louisiana and all it has to offer (and be washed away). Utilizing the elegiac, his work emphasizes the loss of place and culture. Locality is important in this piece. Industrial images scatter the pages as hurricanes loom in the background. A great emphasis lies on family in these poems, as well. I found each poem so moving, exciting, and relatable as a gulf coast resident. I think this is a very important work as the gulf coast states face ecological disaster and internal disrepair from that outward disaster.