Hawks on Wires (review)

In Dave Smith's latest poetry collection, Hawks on Wires, readers will find the beautifully complex dualities and tensions they have come to expect in his work. The book's two epigraphs point toward its larger themes and balance between them. The first, "stīg under læg / eldum uncnð," is taken from Beowulf, and deals with Beowulf's final foe, the dragon. Asleep within a giant grave upon a hill, the dragon guards the treasure of an ancient tribe. The lines Smith cites refer to the passageway into that grave, which is "unknown to mortals." Smith's second epigraph is from Robert Penn Warren's "Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth." In Warren's poem, the hawk's "gold eyes, unforgiving, for they, like God, see all" result in the speaker's complex epiphany. When he sees the hawk, the innocent unknowing speaker "suddenly [knows] the name," and knows himself, and then shoots the hawk. Smith has long been a student and scholar of Warren's work, and these lines, combined with those from Beowulf, evoke Smith's preoccupations in this collection. Like Warren's speaker, Smith grapples with his place in the natural and spiritual worlds, and with the limitations of humans in both. As a poet, Smith must confront these "unknown passageways," striving to see and sing the impossible journey.

Smith is at his best in the first, and most representative, poem in the collection, "The Holy Mother of Connecticut Avenue." There, the chino- and Weejun-wearing young speaker has left his southern college town for Washington, D.C., on Halloween. Masquerading in "white sheets from rope-lines in the South," the speaker sometimes looks like a ghost, and sometimes like the "Holy Mother." He masquerades as a preaching beggar and later uses the money for prostitutes, "scooping each D.C. sweetie in high heels, silky bottom, or / breasts we made do wahs to." Like Robert Penn Warren's, Smith's speaker is coming of age, trying on different selves—the white sheet is charged with overtones of both race and mortality. Here, the speaker's essential questions come from his being out-of-place in the nation's capital, with "Big Lyndon's house dead / ahead," and the Vietnam War looming in the future. The scene with the black prostitute highlights the speaker's struggle with these dualities, as he and his friends

Came on cockroach and hullsof butts, cold pasta in bowls, lay down then on mattress, and I saw how        our Monument's thick white rose shining,            and rats' eyes flickered past

        unmoved by songs we kept humming, candles stubbed,            Bud cans fetched from a roomwholly hung with fearful faces a child's hand had drawn. Brother? You!        She said come, time's money. What child            on small feet so faintly came?

His guilt over this taboo action—she is not only a prostitute, but also African-American—is given the backdrop of the Washington Monument's symbolic "thick white rose," while Smith's speaker finds "nothing more American" than "the rustling hump" and "the sweet thing I was sliding inside." The gritty reality of these scenes, with their cockroaches and "piss-soaked" halls, is complicated by Smith's more grandiose poet-voice, which acknowledges that "it's only a poem // for Christ's sake, where nothing happens, just lies, / never the beautiful ends we dream." By the end of the poem, the speaker has begun to accept the necessary duality of human existence. After the scene with the prostitute, he meets a blind beggar, who serves as a kind of Homeric "seer." He is called by the blind man into the field of poetry, allowing him to embrace what he has learned within this troubling city: "we gave you your tale. // Now go and tell it all."

Smith embraces this challenge to "tell all." He finds the poetic in the mundane and brings that poetry to the foreground, seeing the "acolytes metering a suburb's field" during "Early Bird Dog Training," or a...