Life on Mars (review)

It could be “pure force.” It could be chaos, a storm. It could be floating emotionless in ice-cold outer space. It could be David Bowie. It could be God, and, if it were God, it could be it in so many ways. Tracy K. Smith is able to use the idea of it as a means to delve into the important questions one confronts when in the face of grief and loss—is there really a God, what is life all about, and where do we go when we die—as she searches for perspective and a sense of peace while elegizing her father in Life on Mars.

Life on Mars, Smith’s third collection of poetry, includes thirty poems that are split into four numbered sections. In the first two sections, Smith uses the image of outer space as a vehicle to allow her to explore the even bigger concept of life’s meaning, wondering if “Everything that disappears / Disappears as if returning somewhere.” The image of space becomes all the more poignant when one finds out that Smith’s father was a scientist who worked on NASA’s Hubble Telescope. In the final section of the long poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” Smith describes her experience observing her father when the first images returned from Hubble:

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt shame For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time, The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is— So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Smith weaves this cryptic it throughout the first section of Life on Mars. The it, at times, has no clear antecedent, while in other places it shape-shifts. In “The Museum of Obsolescence,” it refers to the abstract idea of all the things that could have saved humanity, but it becomes more tangible as “It watches us watch it.” In the first section “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” it takes a new form in almost every line before becoming the idea of a cosmic mother, and then morphing into a rural library with books that contain “The most remarkable lies.” The concept of it is a moving target until the poem “It & Co.,” when Smith pins it down for a brief moment to allow the reader to catch on to what it is referring to:

. . . We Have gone looking for It everywhere: In Bibles and bandwidth, blooming Like a wound from the ocean floor. Still, It resists the matter of false vs. real. Unconvinced by our zeal, It is un- Appeasable. It is like some novels: Vast and unreadable.

It, then, embodies the “Truth,” whatever and wherever that may be. Even in Smith’s description, it is “blooming,” in a state of flux.

Life on Mars is not the first book of poetry to explore the metaphorical possibilities of outer space. A few other great recent collections that come to mind are Major Jackson’s Leaving Saturn (2002), Dorianne Laux’s Facts About the Moon (2007), and Frederick Seidel’s Cosmos Trilogy (2003). Yet, Life on Mars brings a fresh take on the image as Smith uses it to juxtapose some of the mysteries of science with the major questions of life and religion. Using space as the great unknown to explore the unknowable is very clever, and Smith executes the device in a way that engages the reader as she feels her way through the vastness of her loss. “My God, It’s Full of Stars” is a microcosm of the format of the first section of the book. It expands out into the distant cosmos, then zooms in on a very concrete scene, only to send us back into the stars again, infusing images from pop culture with science and science fiction, even using humor, and wrapping it all around remembrances of about Smith’s father as Smith sifts through her perception of his life and memory. This excerpt from the third section of the poem illustrates...