Overview

A lyrical search for wisdom and meaning in the life of a man growing up in the New South of desegregating schools, rock-and-roll music, mobile populations, and volatile wars, Little Boats, Unsalvaged displays the profound historical sensibility that has long marked the poetry of Dave Smith. Smith exhibits here a mature perspective on his childhood in a racially violent society and on his troubled search for happiness, whether sexual, professional, or aesthetic. To that, he adds a chorus of elegies for poets central to his understanding of his native region, and a vision of poetry as the art that unites medieval and contemporary elements. Little Boats, Unsalvaged poses a polyphonic inquiry into the experiences and memories of the Vietnam-defined generation.

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9780807131053

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Dave Smith is to be prized as an American poet who looks refreshingly at the past; who indeed brings it alive and into the surface of his own life. - Times Literary Supplement Each will go fast, faster. Then stop. Still as memory. Slack as rope. Books gape. The mystery's breath itself, sun, dark. Sharp keys poke my pocket like a need. Still, I don't want to leave. Lingering with penitents soon to wake seems mostly right, If it's little, really, but masks, a room of dust on fate's books, a room of sun blurring words where people come for answers. - from In the Library

Author Information

DAVE SMITH, Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and memoir, including The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000.

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