The Wick of Memory

In THE WICK OF MEMORY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1970 - 2000 Dave Smith's poetry reveals as never before its roots in the elegiac tradition that has marked a southern literature that has been so prominent in the twentieth century. Yet equally visible now is the ancestral shadow of the Anglo-Saxon poetry from religious questing and the inner voyaging of dreams to the runic parables of nature and its implacable force. Smith's style is a gritty ever realistic presentation of human dilemmas in a world both familiar to us all and eerily strange a world where the actions of individual character and contests over the principles of grace courage and passion still matter. Sailing Atlantic waters exploring domestic relationships or plumbing the sources of memory for a personal and a cultural identity Smith's central concerns are those obligations we honor and those we fail. The thirty new poems in this collection show Smith turning from the work of an accomplished past to new formal practices that highlight a poetry intensely autumnal in its recognition of life's limits. Whether he writes of the weirdness of discount shopping malls a pig's tail or fractured romance Smith finds that behind everything as the image of memory's candle in the darkness reveals is the singular reality of love. THE WICK OF MEMORY is Dave Smith's record of that vision.