Fathers and Children

...The uncompromising posture produced a wild romanticism as Tate declaimed, "The poet is he who fights on the passionate/Side...

...And though we project our emotions upon our surroundings, how can inanimate objects be anything except indifferent to us...

...In "Discovering Obscenities on Her Wall," a young girl is caught having scribbled recently learned four-letter words in her room...

...The epigraph to Rumor Verified, taken from the last verse of Dante' slnferno, reads(in my paraphrase of the Italian)" 1 saw these lovely things that are of Heaven/through a round opening from which we came forth/again to see the stars...

...In "Nekkid," the 14-year-old speaker has hidden from his companions, who are swimming in the James River near Richmond, Virginia...

...And in Smith's examination of the family drama there is, I believe, a progression from the merely autobiographical toward a creativity that needs nothing more to sustain it...

...They concentrated on violence, starkly confronting a life that is all too often nasty, brutish and short...

...Reading the Books Our Children Have Written" continues this exploration of innocence ripening into revelation...

...In such works, Dave Smith reaches a rare plateau: He writes with a perception that has not lost its youthful exuberance, while developing the mature solipsism that has distinguished the greatest American poetry...

...But what can you do...

...Crabs" explores a similar theme: Flying back to his childhood home with his six-year-old daughter, a father who fears he may have brain cancer explains something that happened to him as a boy while crabbing in Virginia...

...There is an infallible instinct for the right battle/On the passionate side...

...Space permits the discussion of only two of the six poems comprising the series, one of Smith's most solid achievements to date...

...Yet in the process of dredging up this incident in his own mind, the giant crab he hunted becomes the symbol for an elusive goal, as well as cancer-something deep and mysterious buried in the unconscious...

...He is both father and son...

...Not hard to believe Poe came from this...

...They have done all this to surprise me, surprising themselves./On the last lined yellow page, one has written This is a poem...

...Abhorring the countryside and naked youths, the speaker identifies with this "manly city, state, what I was...

...His vigor leads him to search for a way out of the fear that we are aliens, estranged from Nature, leading purposeless or destructive lives...

...he asks in the title poem...

...At 76 he is a dynamo, having produced three new books of poetry in four years...

...From a tree, he contemplates the twin mysteries of sex and death, as embodied in the "nekkid" swimmers playing near the spot where a companion had drowned...

...From hundred-year-old windows here and there the sun's light leaped back from warehouses and wharves, taverns, towers, sleeping rooms of whores, probably...

...Increasingly, he tries to capture the glimmering of an answer...

...Musing on whether autumn can serve as a correlative for our own decay, he is disturbed by illusions?-destroying doubts about language's ability to really represent what it purports to describe...

...he is afraid to expose his adolescent body, which at once revolts and attracts him...

...By the time we reach "Fear and Trembling," the lovely conclusion of this book, questions themselves have become a kind of reply...

...In Rumor Verified, Warren takes one more stand in this just war...

...Sustained by irony and compassion for the absurdity of the human condition, Warren pushes on, writing spirited, glowing poetry...

...Such queries threaten to bring the whole artistic house of cards down about our ears in an instant, but Warren always finds hope at the bottom of every Pandora's Box: Can the heart's meditation wake us from life's long sleep, And instruct us how foolish and fond was our labor spentUs who now know that only at the death of ambition does the deep Energy crack crust, spurt forth, and leap From grottoes, dark-and from the caverned enchainment...

...Another of Smith's literary parents is Robert Penn Warren, and nobody can match his energy...

...Once the trip to Virginia is over, Smith says, she will draw on our dream's power, on the dark junked corner of the garage where crabs bobble in thickets of old string, claws waving as if to receive me at last, the one who will pay me out all the years just as I was when she and I were six Although Homage to Edgar Allan Poe (Louisiana, 83 pp., $12.95) is a more lyrical work-the poems are shorter, and many employ the traditional devices of prosody-the underlying concerns are largely the same...

...To me, the cave evoked at the end is Plato's, with its implication that whatever we see may be only the shadow of that reality awaiting us one day...

...He adds, "In love, not ignorance, let her be blessed/to write joy's name and to dirt be witness...

...She is punished, repairs the damage, bathes for bed and "Now she must kiss and lie down in the dark...

...Perhaps pray to God for strength to face the verification / That you are simply a man, with a man's dead reckoning, nothing more...

...Nightcrawlers" describes an imaginary crabber, the kind of crusty patriarch found in many of Smith's poems...

...Give her years before a bright boy beds her...

...Is it only babble...

...His descent from the tree startles two lovers, however, and in witnessing their act he realizes what he is missing as a result of being estranged from his own flesh...

...Poe's hometown is visible in the distance: I saw Richmond, smoke layering its ancestral depths...

...Dreaming of this character and his wife, Smith thinks, "I...could have been their son," a strong image for belief that the imagination begets itself...

...By identifying his youthful shame and fascination with the emotions aroused by his own son's discovery of a paternal copy of Playboy, the poet stumbles on a revelation about the way we finally learn to accept our forebears as people...

...But he remains more powerful than any of his progeny...

...Warren has kept alive a rhetorical grandeur that is rare in modern poetry, and his vitality has influenced and encouraged many younger poets...

...In Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980 (Random House, 97 pp., $9.95) he has, for the moment, laid aside the colloquial free style of his recent verse to return to the more formal language and syntax that marked his contributions to the Fugitive during the early 1920s...

...Warren suggests that despairing people, after acknowledging this not very prepossessing picture of man and his art, ought to be laughing with rueful self-recognition and not brooding in isolated pride...

...This old man, like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, or Yeats' fly fisherman, is the antithesis of the artistic imagination who nonetheless inspires the poet...

...The parental uproar notwithstanding, the father secretly takes her side in a prayer for her future: Lord, while she can let her deny it all...

...In "Afterward," the death of someone once loved yet mistreated drives the "You" addressed in the poem into a depression...

...Despite his versatility and preoccupation with many themes, ultimately both of these books concentrate on relations between fathers and children...

...Studying "the stapled pages, the strange mild / countenances of animals no one has ever seen," the poet ponders his young daughters' image of what it is their father does when he writes a book...

...Smith probes a strange affinity for one of his literary fathers, that troubled genius of the American unconscious, in the title sequence of Homage to Edgar Allan Poe...

...Instead, the poet offers the solace that comes from the presence of objects worn down by loneliness and time: "Ah, menhirs, monoliths, and all /Such frozen thrusts of stone, arms in upward anguish of fantasy, images / By creatures, hairy and humped, on heath, on hill, in holt/Raised...

...it seems that the "unimaginable expanse of polar/Icecap stretching forever in light of gray-green ambiguousness" may be " the only image of eternity...

...Grant her grace in love and yellowed letters, give her a song and dance before these walls...

...We can remember some of the feelings that went into our own artwork as children, especially the exhilarating sense of control accompanying our realizing that we could recreate a piece of the mysterious world...

...Dream Flight (Illinois, 76 pp., $ 10.00), the first volume to appear, once again proves Smith's strength as a Southern storyteller...

...In one sustained narrative, "The Pornography Box," a grown man recalls discovering dirty pictures in his dead father's sea chest as an adolescent...

...At first he hopes the daughter will identify so strongly with the story as to preserve something of his dying self...

...In this enchanting poem, Smith recaptures that wild perception of a world that seems newly made as if for us alone and makes us wonder whether the adult artist is really very different...

...Led by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, the writers associated with this journal were fleeing from the prettified motifs and sugared pretenses of Southern poetry on the one hand, and the sterile, abstract theology of Yankee industrialism on the other...