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The world below the window : poems, 1937-1997
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1998
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Library Journal Review
In a career spanning over six decades, Smith has distinguished himself by producing more than 50 volumes of poetry, translation, children's verse, and literary criticism and by teaching at Williams, Columbia, and Hollins College. He has also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (a post now called Poet Laureate). This fine collection of poems written from 1937 to 1997 is a carefully selected sampling of his highly original and varied art. The book takes as its epigraph two lines from Emily Dickinson‘"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant‘/Success in Circuit lies"‘which is a perfectly apt summation of Smith's practice. Typically, a seemingly straightforward object or event is either transformed into a Stevensian "supreme fiction" or subtly slanted to reveal an unexpected truth: Smith opens "Plain Talk" with the lines, "There are people so dumb, my father said,/ That they don't know beans from an old bedstead," then ends by saying "That's how he felt, that's how I feel." Smith's "feeling," unlike his father's, may be prosaically "dumb." But it is poetically brilliant in refusing to distinguish beans from bedsteads in order to celebrate the integration of the world's inventory, as in "Quail in Autumn," where the eclectic rubble of a "bare place" and a "sullen mood" is suddenly integrated by a startled quail: "a swift sun-thrust of feather/ And earth and air come properly together." These are fine poems from an American master and deserve a place in any library.‘Thomas F. Merrill, emeritus, Univ. of Delaware (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Excluding Smith's translations, longer poems, poetry for children and much of his light verse, this new and selected volume both slims down and augments 1990's Collected Poems. Appearing for the first time, the original, absorbing seven-part series "Indian Removal" searchingly explores the poet's Choctaw heritage by dramatizing America's shameful past on a hot, tear-laden, swampy Southern stage: "There will be no surrender, General. There will be no peace;/ only the murderer who waits, only the poetry that kills." The sobering, hard audacity of these lines can be traced back to Smith's early lyrics (like "Night Music" and "Chrysanthemums") in which formal skill indebted to Hardy and MacLeish barely masks the moral energies shaping concise, rhymed quatrains. Smith moved on, as this well-chosen selection shows, to lusher scenes, wittily evoked self-caricatures ("Mr. Smith" and "The Typewriter Bird") and meditations on poetic tradition, as in "The Descent of Orpheus": "O so much/ Is lost with every day: the black vanes/ Turn in an angry wind, the roses burn/ To ashes on a skeleton of wire." The newest poems confront aging in deftly achieved, Romantic tones. Throughout this summary of a formidable career, Smith's images reveal the inescapability of memory, testifying to its enduring capacity to affirm the power of the imagination. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Better known as a children's poet (Laughing Time, 1990), Smith has written for adults some of the most confidently crafted twentieth-century American formal verse. He began as a philosophical poet concerned with the relationship between physical phenomena and understanding: "The geraniums I left last night on the windowsill," he writes in the title poem, "will be there as long as I think they will." Balancing such flirtation with solipsism, the "I" in Smith's poems is infrequent and seldom personal; he dares instead to speak universally. Sometimes difficult in the manner of Wallace Stevens, he is also as lapidary as Stevens and as moody as another great formalist, Tennyson ("The Wooing Lady" suggests Tennyson recast by Stevens). He has to be pondered, but his imagery and language invite savoring. His later free verse is weaker, his later concerns grosser and even political (a sequence called "The Indian Removal," the subject of Paula Mitchell Marks' history In a Barren Land [BKL Ap 15 98], concludes), but fortunately he never wholly forsakes rhyme and meter. --Ray Olson
Summary
This selection of William Jay Smith's work of sixty years covers the entire career of one of America's acknowledged poetic masters. It moves from the dark pre-war lyrics ( Quail in Autumn) to the powerful long-lined free verse of the 1960s ( The Tin Can). Here are memorable WWII lyrics ( Dark Valentine) and masterful light verse ( The Tall Poets), displaying the wit that enlivens all of Smith's work. Previously uncollected poems range from a haunting delineation of the ironies of age in "The Shipwreck" to the dramatic intensity of The Cherokee Lottery, which deals with the forced removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. Praise for William Jay Smith: "A most gifted and original poet... One of the very few who cannot be confused with anybody else." -- Richard Wilbur "William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and The Cherokee Lottery is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable." -- Harold Bloom "His best poems are unlike anything else in contemporary American literature... Although often based on realistic situations, Smith's compressed, formal lyrics develop language musically in a way which summons an intricate, dreamlike set of images and associations." -- Dana Gioia "William Jay Smith has given us many of the truest and purest poems an American has written: the most resonantly musical, the most magical." -- X. J. Kennedy
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