Volume 48, Number 4 · March 8, 2001
'Catching a Pig on the Farm'
By Helen Vendler
The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems
Dave Smith
Louisiana State University Press, 215 pp., $39.95; $19.95 (paper)
I once asked two friends from the South what they associated most with Southern writing: one said 'rural life' and the other said 'oratory.' The first continued, 'Even if the piece takes place in a town, the people aren't generationally far removed from the country'; and the other added, 'Hymns and sermons are always the backdrop.' To those two ingredients can be added the Civil War and the question of race. All of these can be found in the poetry of Dave Smith, a poet born in Virginia, whose new collection, The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970–2000, offers a summary—severely truncated—of his lifework in poetry. Smith, now fifty-seven, has so far published seventeen books of verse (he has also written two novels, and a collection of essays on poetry, called Local Assays).[1] The Wick of Memory contains 119 poems; they will do, for the time being, as a source by which a Northerner, long attached to Smith's poetry, can perhaps explain its success in conveying to her a life so different from her own.
Review, 4182 words
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