Words by the Water, and: Dancing in the Garden (review)

William Jay Smith takes the epigraph for his new collection of poetry, Words by the Water, from Melville ("O Love, O Love, these oceans vast"), but one senses that Donne's famous line, "No man is an island," would have been equally appropriate. An island, in this case the atoll of Palmyra where the author was stationed during World War II, becomes one of the central metaphors in the opening section:

An island is all one can ever know    And all that can ever beThough part of a vast archipelago    Rooted in the sea.

Sense of self, the stanza implies, is relative and conditional—and indeed much of Words by the Water relies on others—from the ten translations (of poets as diverse as Jules Laforgue and Basho) to the four epithalamiums for family members and friends in the section entitled "The Greatest Wealth: Wedding Songs."

But the book also relies on the poet's mastery of form—a hallmark quality of Smith's over his distinguished career—and here we find examples of ballad stanzas, dramatic monologues, riddles, sonnets, lullabies, in addition to the light verse, epithalamiums, and translations that comprise their own individual sections. The result is usually a delightful mosaic, rather than a scattered catalog, and it is made so mostly by Smith's rhythmic and sonic control:

Under fronded boughs,Lizard-blue, the waterLicks the white shore,

And the trades blow calm.Upon my wall, the shadow of a giant palmBranch bends, a claw, a hand,

Like all reality in reflectionCaught, out of time, beyond waves' hum,And wind's delirium.

These stanzas, from the poem "Reflection," mimic rhythmically what the speaker is trying to describe—waves, breath, the wind in the trees, poetic lines themselves—so that "reflection" is meant in a double, if not triple, sense. The effect is soothing, to be sure, until the spondaic start of the last stanza that wakes the reader up and yanks him from this Platonic cave of shadows: "Rage, wild water."

Indeed, much of Words by the Water is about waking and being awake, whether literally, as in "On His Dark Bed":

He who has felt on his dark bed    The pressure of the tidesFinds sunlight ebbing round his head,    Morning on all sides.

Or figuratively, as when a soldier with two prosthetic legs recognizes a "a world whose wars will never end," or in the sobering post 9-11 poem, "Invitation to Ground Zero." Avoiding the kind of direct condemnation one finds in other of Smith's "political" poems like "Old Cherokee Woman's Song" or "Song of the Dispossessed," the poet in "Invitation" allows the figure of a "a buried bone-white naked mannequin" to juxtapose the horrors of this disaster with the impersonality of artifice. The result is the poignant artifice of the poem itself—as good a 9-11 poem, by my estimate, as X. J. Kennedy's "September Twelfth, 2001."

Some of the stranger poems in the collection are also the most memorable, as in the companion piece to "Invitation"—the appropriately-titled "Contemplations of Conspiracy":

Where can they lead you but over the bridges of beetroot into the country of spiders?

Or in the pastoral, dream-like "A Green Oasis," where a "woman in a green / oasis brings / pomegranates to the train." These private meditations work as well, I think, as the poems obviously meant for public audiences, such as the epithalamiums or the long poem dedicated to the Rhodes Scholar Class of 1947. In "The Bouquet," for instance, Smith borrows a kind of Harlequin romance language ("And there it was that lightning struck," "She felt deep-down a tingling shock / And up her spine an icy chill") that prepares for a Shakespearean conclusion:

Of flowers that of words are madeThat will not wither or decayThat worm or insect won't invadeAnd here in print is meant to stay.

And in perhaps...