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  • Dirge for an Imaginary World by Matthew Buckley Smith
  • Amy Arthur (bio)
Matthew Buckley Smith, Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse Press, San Jose, CA, 2012). 65pp.

Matthew Buckley Smith’s debut collection, Dirge for an Imaginary World, bears a title that promises hefty poems, and does not disappoint. The [End Page 277] book’s first section introduces us to the poet as a distanced observer of human life who comments on the dim beginnings of our species, reimagines mythology, addresses the muse, and tries to untangle mankind’s ever-knotty relationship with faith—no small tasks. Titles such as “Faith,” “Meaning,” and “Night” show us early on that this book means business.

In “Benediction” the speaker begins in the present, “Walking at dawn,” but is quickly swept away into the larger scope of human history:

Walking at dawn, I think I understand What brought the ancients to that pale horizon. How awful—and how perfect—to demand You show Your face, the sun, against all reason.

Like many other poems in the book, and particularly in this section, “Benediction” unfolds within the confines of a sonnet. This form serves Smith well, its demand for tight logic mitigating the danger of becoming lost in subjects so large. More importantly, Smith wears the sonnet like a pair of well-broken-in shoes, drifting toward and away from exact rhyme and meter as they suit or risk hindering the subject’s progress. In the lines quoted above, for example, the troubled link between the perfection and awfulness of the demand is underscored by the uneasy rhyme of “horizon” with “reason.” This uneasiness continues through the next quatrain as Smith describes the ancient impulse to read the natural world for evidence of a creator, rhyming “find” and “hand.” Yet as the poem draws to a close, Smith moves toward more exact rhyme, sealing off the final couplet with “resist” and “exist”:

We should be grateful for their hopes, the fires From which we’ve lit our own, the names they said You answer to, the prayers You can’t resist, We who so seldom beg You to exist.

Part of the appeal of these early poems lies in Smith’s willingness to express both a longing for, and a resignation over the loss of, faith. In the sonnet entitled “Faith,” the speaker acknowledges the messiness of this position, beginning, “Maybe the glass I raise was drained / Two thousand years ago,” and continues a few lines down with, “Wanting reply, my correspondence grows / Halfhearted, repetitious.” Beginning the poem with the word “maybe,” the speaker expresses both doubt and, to some extent, doubts about his own doubts. He may suspect that his prayers go unanswered, but he is compelled to offer them nonetheless, halfhearted though they may be. In the Gospel of Mark, a father approaches Christ in hopes of healing for his demon-possessed son. Christ tells the man, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” The father’s [End Page 278] response? “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” Smith’s speakers, then, are modern counterparts to this man, acting out faith in the midst of doubt. The scale does often tip in the direction of doubt, however, as in the close of “Faith”: “Maybe my hope the mysteries will resume / Is seed cast, fondly, to a barren womb.” That “maybe” is still present, leaving room for the possibility of belief, but the outlook is grim.

Throughout sections two and three of Dirge, Smith maintains his role as poet-observer, but shifts his focus to material more firmly anchored in his own experience. Just as our early ancestors look to the world—“the raveled fern,” “the workings of the hand”—for some greater meaning in “Benediction,” in “Elegy with Bradford Pear Trees” the speaker’s attempt to understand a particular night is shaped by physical detail. In the poem the speaker recalls driving through Athens, Georgia, with an unnamed “you,” presumably the person for whom the elegy is written. Smith creates a kind of hall of mirrors as details from that night are reflected and distorted in the process of remembering. The blooming Bradford pears’ odor...

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