the graves grow bigger between generations

I always approach a new book of poetry the way one wanders through a foreign city after arriving, weaving through narrow streets and alleys, jet-lagged and happy, enjoying the dreams. Only later do I pull out a map for directions.

After noting the cover of Jared Smith’s new book, a photo of dark smokestacks and billowed pollution, I knew that he would continue in this collection to convey his love of the natural world and his regret of its desecration by industry and the corporate greed that fathers it. I also knew, from the title, that this author of six previous books of poetry would explore the vastness of time and space, the closeness of familial ties, and the weariness of the American worker in the tradition of Sandburg and Whitman, with a touch of Studs Terkel thrown in.

I started at the end with poems about the state of baseball, the sight of dead geese and rabbits, and the thoughts in the mind of a cow. What all these poems have in common is the disconnect between inner contentment and the noncommittal violence of nature unbalanced, the nostalgia for the humanity of everyday life versus some new kind of threat posed by the harsh political and economic realities of the Twenty-first Century. In “Poetry and Baseball and Pay-As-You-Go,” the poet contrasts the million-dollar salaries of sports celebrities with “the chrome real men sweated over for most of their lives in / dark rocky mines and dark musty factories and dark were their lives.” Even poetry is a business of sorts, and even poets must make a living: “It’s not like street yard baseball, this poetry thing anymore,/where you used to lean back with whatever piece of wood you found/lying around and hit each clunker of coal as far as it would go.” In these lines, the poet reclaims the carefree days of my own childhood when, as an inveterate tomboy, I played stickball one-handed in an empty lot, and decades later have also faced the conflict between the spontaneous creation of art and the relentless labor for a paycheck.

The same anxiety echoes in “At Breakfast with All the King’s Men,” in which “something slow is happening in the mind of a cow,” connecting the blankness, the perhaps-madness, of the cow with the corruption and degradation that has survived and flourished “long after Robert Penn Warren” wrote his justly-celebrated novel.

In “Something New is Hunting,” the griefs of nature are unnamed but nevertheless palpable: “For fifty-seven years I’ve walked the evening streets / and felt comfort in the wind of stars . . . .But something new is hunting closer to the bone now . . . .” These almost frightening lines remind the reader of the increased fragmentation of nature, a pessimistic yet realistic commentary that human greed and folly return to haunt us, and there is no going back.

The demise of nature as we know it pervades the book, but sprinkled into the dark longer poems are small personal glimpses, such as “With Sunsets,” “What I Take To My Grave,” “After Twenty-Five Years,” “A Prayer in the Teeth of Time,” and “Learning to Breathe,” where lovers and children and aging emerge in succinct lines that are as powerful as the broad eloquence for which Smith is better known. In fact, the tightness of these brief poems will surprise and delight the reader familiar with “Lake Michigan and Other Poems,” a sprawling meditation, celebration, and elegy in lengthier pieces. Now, in Smith’s own words, “I’m glad myself / to think of little things that carry weight.”

The place of the poet in contemporary society, which ends the book in Smith’s final couplet of the baseball poem, appears in greater detail earlier in the book. In “Poets,” the refrain, “The enemies of our leaders are poets,” begins rather than ends each stanza, and in one verse, continues: “. . . not good men necessarily, not all, but neither are they men who fire hell-fire missiles / into mud-bricked homes in the desert . . .” Similar hard-hitting anti-war statements emerge in “Who Carries this Message?” “Why Put Up with this Anymore?” and “Whatever Happened to Johnny Rebel?” which bring the arrogant military escapades of current and past administrations back to their origins in corporate board rooms that control money and guns. “It’s American as cherry pie,” Smith cynically observes. Still other poems, such as “Lowered Expectations in the Lower 48” and “So You Say You Got A Job” force the reader to connect the dots between the suffering of both blue-collar and white-collar workers and a decline in democracy and morality.

Smith’s world encompasses airports, digital communication, offices buildings and construction sites, parks, woodlands, and Chicago alleys, and in all these settings, courage and joie de vivre contrast markedly with despair. Compassion survives misery, but just barely. The sprawling emotions of the title poem say it well: “I swear I’m going to remember this, and forget the graves, / and forget the markers and forget the names, but I’m going to remember / the smell of furniture polish on old oak banisters, and the dust of books, / and the coolness of old stone buildings in sleepy towns on summer days . . . the depth of shadowed rooms, a silent ray of light, purple flowers and a woman’s touch. The graves get ever bigger from one generation to the next.” That Carnegie left libraries (such as the one in the photograph at the beginning of the book) to small towns as well as empires to the greedy is some small consolation to those who long for the civility and wisdom and humanity represented by these microcosms of learning.

Smith is unafraid of content in an age when poetry often has nothing to say, and even less on the page except for brilliant wordplay. Smith confronts the major issues of our time, going beyond the merely glib. In his title poem, “The Graves Grow Bigger . . .” he invites the reader into the slow, deep wisdom of the years, reflecting the triumph of ordinary human beings engaged in the sweat and sacrifice of everyday living, never underestimating the toll that industry takes on individuals, society, and the natural world, but salvaging the dignity of the work which leads us to our graves, generation to generation.

One of my favorite poems is “Having Never Wanted to Own the Business,” in which the narrator spins out powerful images of life in the business world, highlighting the false sense of importance bestowed on workers by corporate identity: “Just to hear someone say my name one time during the day . . . “ He pulls the reader into the poem as energy gathers at the end: “And I come to you to plea . . . . / absolutely filled with dismay, / that those of us who are breaking away have broken away the same way you are breaking away.” The plea that ends the poem is to touch the only real thing, love, before it is too late: “I come to you tired and heavy with the arguments of salesmen / who have died in unwashed alleys holding photos of their children.” And even that love, so dramatically portrayed here, can also be illusory.

reviewed by Donna Pucciani, Wheaton, Illinois

Jared Smith, The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations. Higganum, CT: Higganum Hill Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0977655687.