Smith Almanac

Poems
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-4803-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 96 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry

Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.

This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.

From Almanac:

THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM
Austin Smith

Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town
Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs
of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks
or the molds of busts donated by the Art
Institute of Chicago to this dying
town's little museum, there was a mummy,
a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit
room by himself. I used to go
to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh
who, expecting an afterlife
of beautiful virgins and infinite food
and all the riches and jewels
he'd enjoyed in earthly life,
must have wondered how the hell
he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois.
And I used to go alone into that room
and stand beside his sarcophagus and say,
"My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Austin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

The Silo 5

Queen-Anne's Lace 7

Fort-Da 8

Thistles 10

The Night My Mother 11

How a Calf Comes into the World 13

Lightning 15

Autumn's Velocity 16

The Brinkmeiers 19

Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972 20

Dean 22

Coach Chance 24

The Man Accused of Fucking Horses 25

The Bait Shop 26

Memoir of My Imaginary Sister 27

Neon Apotheosis 28

Bingo 31

Stephenson County Fair in Wartime 33

Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 34

Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb 35

The Battlefield 37

The Pit 39

The Man Who Poisoned Robert Johnson 40

Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants 41

Sharpener of Knives 43

Overlord 45

The Hotel 48

The Equation 50

Resonance 51

Postcards to Andrew Wyeth 52

Recollection 54

Letter to My Father Written in a Bar in Mitchell, South Dakota 55

On a Greyhound Bus in America 56

Mission 57

The Scythe 58

The Mummy in the Freeport Art Museum 59

Sirens 60

A Serious House on Serious Earth 61

Poem for Les, Homeless 63

Elegy for Missing Teeth 65

Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips 66

The Trencher 68

Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down 71

The Key in the Stone 73

Wake 75

Notes 79

Acknowledgments 81

Über Autor(innen)

Austin Smith was born in the rural Midwest. Most recently, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.