Research Catalog

Title

Fate's kite : poems, 1991-1995 / Dave Smith.

Author

Smith, Dave, 1942-

Publication

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 104 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• In this stunningly wrought collection, Dave Smith presents a galaxy of souls searching for "something" through the dusty lens of a lost faith. If religion is the arena in which we engage ultimate meaning, then these are religious poems indeed, prayers and meditations of the cosmically disenfranchised looking for a sign among the detritus of a broken world: "Lord, admit/us, we lived here, almost happy, almost yours." But where, really, are we? And how - and why - did we get here?
• Pulsing, carefully orchestrated, these thirteen-line poems are tightly wound miracles of compression, alive with texture and color, sharp with the raw flavors of sex, blood, and seawrack, ready to explode off the page.
• Ranging from youth, all moonlight and speed and violent ecstasy, through the fierce disillusionment of middle age to the final decline, snagged on "memory's hook"; from the sun-shot desolation of the contemporary American South to the faded marmoreal glory of Europe - Smith forges a craggy metaphysics that stops just this side of despair, finding Delphic moments of affirmation of our kinship with the physical world.

Contents

• Arising -- Home Prayer -- The Innerness of Churchland -- Hammer and Sickle -- Elizabeth River Water Skiers -- Fiddlers -- Latin Lesson -- Wreck in the Woods -- A Lay of Spring -- First Tournament Learning Experience -- Selective Service, 1965 -- In the Nansemond River -- Old Country -- Blowfish and Mudtoad -- The Gods in My Belly Listen -- The Bullpasture and the Cowpasture Couple -- A Supernatural Narrative -- Seafarer -- Circa 1650 -- A Librarian's Gift -- Green Duty -- Elegy for My Friend's Suit -- Nine Ball -- Walking Through Camouflage -- A Map of Your Small Town -- Cows Calling -- Glendalough's Round Tower -- Boys in the Square at Bologna -- Gold Bird and the Age -- Breasts -- One Way Through Our Public Park -- Louis Armstrong & the Astronauts Meet at the Langley AFB Pool -- The Endless Days of Sixties Sunshine -- Compost Pile -- Otter like a Muse -- Answer to a Poet's Last Letter -- Christmas Lights Still On -- Field Dressing -- Watering the Dog --
• Almost at Sea -- The Louisiana Sea of Faith -- Stained Glass at Churchland Baptist -- Onion Mother -- The Franklin Street Quadrilles -- Where the Garden Grows -- Owl Play -- Sitting on Babies -- Making a Statement -- Keats Speaks -- Wolves -- Lunch -- Reading for William Everson -- Nature Moment -- On His Son's New Blue Guitar -- Another Nature Moment -- Daily Messenger -- Mississippi River Bridge -- Fantastic Pelicans Arrive -- Novelist with Harley -- Accounts -- Performing Fiction -- Water Pitcher -- Velvet Running -- Wreckage at Lake Pontchartrain -- A Gift for Seamus -- Brittany -- Architect -- About the Farmer's Daughter -- One Hundred Twenty-Nine Dollars -- Audubon and Cha Cha -- Doctor's Office -- Old Friend -- The Righteousness of Farrakhan -- What I Got -- Palm Trees at 1430 Knollwood Drive -- The Collapsing Library -- Remembering Cigarettes -- Train to St. Andrews, Scotland -- Irish Whiskey in the Backyard -- The Penumbral Legacy of Huey P. Long --
• Fireflies at Bennington, July 4 -- Quail -- Burglar Alarm -- A Tune for Maura Dooley -- Ghost Houses -- A Dodge Man with No Daughters -- Crying in the Streets -- Stalled on the Ebb Tide -- Canary Weather in Virginia -- Descending.

ISBN

• 0807120405 (alk. paper)
• 0807120413 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

95024788

OCLC

• 32922080
• ocm32922080

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries