One Stranger to Another by Edwin E. Smith
Very Good!!!
A small review:
Edwin Smith talks about revision, false starts, what poems will last and why it is important to write not just for contemporary publications but for the audiences of Frost, Whitman, and even Keats and Shakespeare. He discusses the value of finding your own voice. And he tells very movingly, how he “often left my warehouse job after a fourteen-hour shift and wrote a sonnet the same way another man might drink a beer or watch a ball game.” Since I felt so connected with the poet, I was surprised that I had trouble getting into his poems. One that Smith considers his best, “Springtime Come,” contains this verse about a seven-year old in a school yard: “…tired from the recess and tarrying there, / giving no thought or fancy to the day / long years later when heavy with days / solitude would be in itself complete,” which to me seems lifeless and excessive. The images of the first poems are good enough, but the poems seem over-written and reaching for meaning and importance they don’t earn. Then in “Aquarium” we are treated to a rich vision of the moon as “some big fish / swimming blunt, / slow and deliberate” and we are suddenly through the doorway of words into a world of surreal beauty. “Dark of the Moon” speculates about what would have happened if they had left Buzz Aldrin stranded on the moon, “separated by more than time and space / from even the rain and the wind.” The moon seems to be a touchstone again revisited in “Café Satellites” “Other planets have many moons, / is ours a spoiled brat only child / twisted insane by loneliness / bound to us not by love but desperation?” Wow!
One of my personal favorites is “Never the Jailer” though I wish Smith would have inverted the two final words “like something worn upon the brow / that isn’t a crown quite.” There is such a nice thing going with the “worn” ”brow” “crown” sounds that the vowels and consonants of “quite” sidetrack. Besides the inverted word order strives too much to be poetic. Getting published in small literary journals may be of questionable benefit, but reciting poems before an open mike helps iron out things the eye may not see, but the ear hears. The people who write poetry and those of us who read it are not “One Stranger to Another.” In fact, we may feel we know each other more intimately than we know our spouses or children. We share an experience, and more significantly, the challenge of grasping that experience in words…
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