A Furious Vision of Beauty and Peril

The red wolf of R. T. Smith's title is lupus erythematosus, which Flannery O'Connor inherited from her father and which led to her death at the age of thirty-nine just as it had taken her father in her youth. In these thirty-five poems Smith has created "a dreamed version" of O'Connor, "not the Actual Flannery, but a Possible Flannery." Most of the events in the poems are fictitious, though some are based loosely on details from the recent Brad Gooch biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor and other biographical works, and on O'Connor's selected letters, The Habit of Being, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, as well as from the store of rumors and recollections of those who knew her.

Here is O'Connor in her early failure at accordion lessons; as the student of Andrew Lytle at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; as a Yaddo resident and friend of Robert Lowell; as a young woman in love; and as resident of Andalusia, her mother's working farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia—a place where she vowed she would never live. Necessity in the form of lupus returned her to that farm, and her talent burgeoned as she fought back against the disease with her Royal typewriter and discovered in local characters and their lingo fit subjects for her stories.

R. T. Smith previously has often employed localisms in his poems and fiction, and here he has O'Connor saying, "The corn is runty," and the rooster has "survived another chop day." "I thought it worth our wool to play it safe," she says of an encounter with one of her potential "freak" characters, whom she also categorizes as "nannies and gruffs." A slick preacher is "jimber-jawed."

Smith's exploration of "the confluence of southernness, Catholicism, nascent feminism, quick wit and a furious vision of beauty and peril and darkness" works. This is a highly readable collection, often subtly rhymed, and loaded with the textures and strong imagery of his earlier volumes—"the greedy star-glint of a diamondback's eye," in one instance, and this wounded deer in another:

            Highin a solitary pecan older than me    a mock birdwas making believe he    represented all that fliesand sings, so I followed and    found in the duska dying buck still gushing blood    and thrashingin the brush. An arrow was stuck    in his neckup to the feathers, like a crazed    bird had triedto fly into his flesh. Ambushing    beastsfor sport is a sin. As the deer    trembled to still,I watched the clouds fill his gold    eyes.

Everywhere in these poems it is evident that Smith understands the ethos of Flannery O'Connor's Catholicism, in which the spiritual world is revealed via the physical world, as above, where a lesson on one of the seven deadly sins is presented. She was also a reader of Teilhard de Chardin, Mauriac, and the saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—hardly a "pork-chop-and Jesus Sideshow" writer, as the slick magazines sometimes typecast her.

Among her friends were Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Giroux, John Hawkes, Robie Macauley, Katherine Anne Porter, J. F. Powers, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and many others then on the contemporary literary scene. She was a habitual correspondent from the farm and an astute critic as well. Smith has her say: "Devious, I suppose, but a writer who's not / ruthless can be neither sweet nor salty nor / cut the mustard." Her takes on academic symposia are hilarious as well. Smith has her tell a friend, "I have just escaped from a carnival sinposium" where "religion is a fine thing because / it's akin to magic and lets you say ad nauseum / 'symbology,' 'symbolism.'"

In both his fiction and poems Smith has worked with diverse voices before, putting words in the mouths of John Wilkes Booth and other historical figures, as well...