Smoke

Dorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted—poetry that “gets hard in the face of aloofness,” in the words of one reviewer. A s in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In “The Shipfitter’s Wife,” a woman recalls her husband’s homecoming at the end of his work day: "Then I’d open his clothes and take the whole day inside me--the ship’s gray sides, the miles of copper pipe, the voice of the foreman clanging off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead kissing metal. The clamp, the winch, the white fire of the torch, the whistle, and the long drive home." And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures: "Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat’s eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe . . .." With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.

Wing

         for Miguel Hernández
         (1910-1942)

Madrid, 1934

Until a shepard boy from Orihuela
climbed a tree, curled his bare toes
around a high olive branch, buried his face
among the leaves and whistled, Neruda
had not heard a nightingale.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2000

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Price: $14.95