Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith (review)

In Ordinary Light, her coming-of-age memoir, Tracy K. Smith describes a childhood of constant learning about the world—including the complex histories of race—from television shows, the nightly news, and the adults whose conversations she overheard. Sometimes she sat in her classroom, imagination drifting, "telling myself that the world was a place I would get to one day, and that when I was there, my presence would mean something." She wanted to be more a part of the world that so far she knew only by hints, intimations, and guesses. As she later reflects, "I wanted to be there on the ground, waiting to be caught up—by history? agony?—and claimed." This sometimes agonizing history is the entanglement of narratives that it is a life's work to negotiate. On the one hand, we are born into it; on the other, there is always more of it to know, more of it to find ourselves in, more to do, and more to be influenced by; the stories keep shifting, and the stuff of these entangled narratives always exceeds the structures by which we understand them.

This desire to be more fully a part of the world is the opening note of Wade in the Water, Smith's fourth poetry collection, with the aptly titled "Garden of Eden," that place which the famous couple, whom Milton called "our first parents," had to leave before history could begin. The speaker recalls life in her thirties when it seemed that everyone she knew was "ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy," and she found herself "doing / Bank-balance math and counting days." Waiting to move from this state of innocence into knowledge and some kind of more fully engaged public life, she saves up for what is to come as she watches the calendar march out its days so that she can eventually be caught up and claimed. Of course, this Pulitzer Prize winner, 22^nd poet laureate of the United States, Princeton University professor, and public face of poetry has been "claimed" many times over. All the same, the closing lines' "known sun setting / On the dawning century" signal that our endings and beginnings are provisional and partial—for the concepts of a day and a century as segments of history and lived experience are caught up in more human constructions than I can even begin to enumerate here. There is always more to be claimed by and more to claim.

In this collection Smith makes her own distinctive claims on history as she, for example, draws together multiple voices from the letters of African Americans who served in the Civil War. The resulting poems speak uncannily to our very moment. The sequence, titled "I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It," opens with an appeal to President Lincoln from a woman asking that her son be released from military service, for, her husband dead and her other son twice wounded, the son currently serving is her only support; "now I am old," she writes, "and my head is blossaming / for the grave." [As I attempt to clarify in the following sentence, Smith is using the spellings she finds in these letters.] In her note to the sequence, Smith writes that as much as possible, she has preserved the spelling and punctuation of these letters, so that we get a personalized touch in these already very personal moments, as when this woman, quite alone in the world, appeals for help as she looks to the grave as a moment to bloom into whatever it is that comes next. It's an especially affecting poem to read in an era where family separation has been part of the daily news.

A little further on, another section also addresses the president:

Mr president    It is my Desire to be free to go to see my peopleon the eastern shore        my mistress wont let me      you will pleaselet me know if we are free          and...