Kirjahaku

"This is no fairy tale. / It's all fantastic and bizarre and true. / It's my life, a raspy song, that sounds better if you sing along." The men and women who live and work near Opelika, Alabama, gather at the Hollow Log Lounge. There, under the watchful eye of the stuffed fox behind the bar, they unload their gripes and worries, tell their stories, argue, joke, commune, complain, and confess. In this collection of poems, R. T. Smith paints a vividly imagined portrait of the community in this small-town bar, capturing the chorus of the patrons' voices echoing off the knotted wood-paneled walls. Smith's stand-in, Sam Buckhannon, scribbles stories heard and overheard as tongues loosened by liquor spin out monologues in which southern idiom and vernacular seem perfectly at home within the constraints of measured verse.

With craggy Celtic metaphysics and perfect linguistic pitch, R. T. Smith evokes the landscape, culture, and history of Ireland and the New World through the eyes and ears of an outsider. Words matter to Smith, and the language of these poems is knotty and precise, blazing into moments of recognition with the elliptical testimony and spare light of everyday objects:. . . adze and hammer, gate latch, cracked Baleek and a Claddagh brooch.It is this muted voice of perfection, speaking from the simple lines of Shaker furniture, that chills the speaker of ""New Lebanon"" as he reflects upon the religious sect's ""hard bargain / with God, their promise / to be virtue's monsters.""Trespasser arcs with rigorous unity of vision from the secular to the heights of spiritual rapture, until the demarcation between world and spirit finally begins to blur. In a parable of the perfection in disorder, ""Before the Breakup"" juxtaposes the heartbreak of parting against the discovery of a bee embalmed in a jar of bramble jam. And ""Passage to Kilronin,"" a meditation on the drowning of a boy from one of the local trawlers, eloquently voices the notion of cosmic kinship.The collection ends on an eerily pastoral note with the crepuscular, self-composed epitaph of St. Gristle, a holy madman:I will be love's gallows, all sap and marrow, mad lament of shadows and a mouthful of birds dying to sing.Surely, this book suggests, between world and spirit there is, for those who can see, no demarcation at all. Trespasser is a dazzling, passionate collection, certain to delight and move any reader who has an ear for the music of language played by a virtuoso.

A companion volume to his previous collection Trespasser and the second book of the trilogy Dreaming in Irish, Messenger continues R. T. Smith's exploration of the threshold between story and song. Employing a disciplined and echoing free verse, Smith touches the sources of emotion without losing his poems' extraordinary composure, offering coherence and order in service of the ecstatic note.Binding the lyric to narrative, these poems move almost imperceptibly from delicate descriptions of the poet's native southern landscape to memories of a tender boyhood amid Scots-Irish relatives to the customs and politics of contemporary Ireland. They invoke Audubon, Bartram, Dickey, Poe, and Joyce to pursue the mythic patterns behind everyday circumstances and the joyful possibilities in work, music, and family life. Smith weaves the language of Catholic faith with both American and Irish rural surroundings, providing the fuel for quiet allegories. He listens and observes, and seeks to bridge the chasm between his world and his words, exercising what he calls ""a desire old as cave paintings,/ the wish to entice some wild thing/ and make beauty local,/ to bring something graceful/ close to the language of home.

Written in the gothic tradition of James Dickey's Buckdancer's Choice, Brightwood contains thirty-eight poems set in the American South. This intellectual and emotionally powerful collection is an interplay of southern music, religion, and culture with nature. Driven by memories of life in the rural, segregated South, the poems seek out beauty in an attempt to stave off loneliness, pain, and loss. The lyrics are moving, the language crackles, and the past haunts every verse.

In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts. A Confederate reenactor receives a message from the beyond to lay to rest the remains of Stonewall Jackson's horse. A docent at Washington and Lee University's Lee Chapel offers prim instruction on the facts and legends about ""the General"" with both reverence and irony. The young son of a lewd, alcoholic, self-dubbed evangelist acquires the wits - and the will - for survival by protecting the family's sunflower crops. A midget ukulele virtuoso is so surprised by his own eruption into violence that he can attribute it only to genetics. One of Jeff Davis's fellow cross-dressers; the killer of John Wilkes Booth; a Rebel deserter whose superior exacts his pound of flesh - all these characters and more, through their twisted and torn vernaculars, seek understanding and revival in R. T. Smith's superb collection.

In the Night Orchard is a retrospective collection of poems gleaned from over three decades of writing by a poet absorbed by nature and culture in the American South. These often-narrative poems are concerned with history, race, indigenous music, the many Southern dialects and customs and the quest for authentic identity.