Looking Up: Poems, 2010–2022

by Dave Smith

Looking Up collects more than a decade of new poems by Dave Smith. These include reflections upon events, animals, and people who prove to have a salutary significance to this poet, now approaching his eightieth year. He ponders the substantial changes wrought by retirement, which brings no expectations, no obligations, no role beyond what one has left, which prompts the question, What will you do now? Both the question and its answers are the subject of Looking Up, as Smith gives us poems as acts of attention, raptures, comedies, sardonic narratives, vignettes of grief and joy whose testimony shows that love is surely our core reality.

128 pages, Paperback

Published December 14, 2022

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Alan Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though weighed down by mortality, the quotidian, and the gravity of his nature, Smith’s words rise like a fountain toward revelation and transcendence. His poems, whether recalling childhood, considering family, nature, a neighbor’s visit, horses, a round of golf, or a gift of tomatoes, are eloquent, intimate, confident, humble, and vigorous. He tells us of mud and angels, of stink and Jesus. He grounds every glimpse of beauty in the earth, especially the shoreline when the tide is out, with dead creatures, muck, and waste exposed.

I wonder why
I go on writing about banged-up boats,
Marshes where east wind drags a sour stink,
Men’s sewage sliming the gold-tinted spears
You’d be hard pressed to imagine as glory

he rhetorically asks. He tells us that his main influence was Robert Penn Warren but he reminds me equally of Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke. He seems always to end in the immanent as though, although death is always present to him, that just makes it even more important to treasure both beauty and imagination. He ends “Dead Fish,” the poem quoted above

My love
beside me breathing harder, the moon is
filling our house with pleasure like seafoam
silvering the marsh edge. The tide is going,
wind in the trees makes note of it, lying
alone we can feel death in all things slink away.

This may not seem quite as sublime as when, encountering a hummingbird, he says “I feel my breath stop/as if I understand a meaning I did not see,/the way a writer listens even as words go/humming off in the brain;” but death slinking away is no small thing either. To my mind Dave Smith is one of the best poets, perhaps the best, of his generation; and this book is one of his best, comparable to Goshawk, Antelope and Cuba Night. Time and again he surprises us; takes us to places no other poet seems to explore. He writes about things that matter to most of us, acknowledging misery and foulness, the challenges we face; but rising past them to the joys of working and learning and living in a wonderful and mysterious world.