The Palms: Poems

Smith's ( Indistinguishable from the Darkness ) third book of poetry opens with the disclosure of his mother's betrayal of his father just after their wedding: ``. . . it is one week / before he will find her in bed with his best friend.'' In a series of poems written mostly in long sentences broken into lines of verse, Smith sets beautiful language against a stark human landscape of murder and incest, and a natural world of light, wind and blossoms. But this is not Southern gothic writing; Smith's impulse is one of ``leaning against the foreknowledge of pain.'' Perhaps because of the pain, his narrator is often an observer who poses understanding as a barrier against misery. The poems work best, however, when abstractions of will and intellect are thrown over for lyric images that drive feeling to the fore. In ``The White City,'' Smith gives us ``the city floundered,'' and we ``grow used to it,'' yet it's the closing that touches us: ``the doctor, come at last, / presses the girl's slight hand that/is growing pale as he holds it.'' His images finally carry us to his heart: ``I'm open like a child's blue coat as he runs.'' This is an uneven book, but in poems like ``To Lautreamont,'' ``The Rose,'' ``Omnipotence,'' and ``Mother at 80,'' Smith shows us his power without seeming to try--one mark of a major poet. (Mar . )