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Frederick Smock
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
812 Frederick Smock “Kentuckie” Frederick Smock is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Bellarmine University, where Abigail Gramig was his student. Still a young man himself (he was born in 1954), he is a vital link between the aging contemporary poets of this gathering and the fledgling writers in his classes waiting to put their inspired words into print for all of us to read. Smock has published several collections of poems: 12 Poems (1991), Gardencourt (1997), Guest House (2003), and The Good Life (2000), the last from which this poem was taken. “Kentuckie” is a summation as well as a good ending for this anthology. Moreover, it is a fit beginning for the stories, essays, plays, novels, and poems yet to come from this good land and its people. h What was that blurred quiver of light I half-glimpsed, walking in Cherokee Park, where three hundred years ago Indians of five nations came to hunt? High up on a ridge, a bare knuckle of land over rock, in amongst the trees and fallen leaves— an ashwood bow drawn— a breath held against that moment the grouse steps gingerly around the may-apple—then the letting out of breath, the arrow quick as a wish finding the heart of the heart of the matter, and dropping, plump, to the ground, to the dark and bloody ground, three hundred years ago. ...