– Originally published in New Letters Magazine

Massachusetts-born Tracy K. Smith is a heavy hitter in the world of modern American poetry. Her previous four collections each earned prestigious honors, including the Pulitzer Prize Life On Mars. Smith, named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2017, is known for her political and precise poems. Shirking no topic or responsibility, Smith’s words imbue the nuanced pain of the modern world with delicate truth and simplicity. Her willingness to write so shrewdly on such wide-sweeping topics—and the grace and brilliance with which she does so—marks her as not only an excellent poet, but an esteemed thinker of the 21st century. In her 2021 collection Such Color, Smith pulls together her best work from her previous four collections, as well as debuts fresh new work under the final section, “Riot: New Poems”. In compiling her own history in Such Color, Smith cements her own legacy in her own words.

The book’s first section, gathered from 2003’s The Body’s Question, grapples with growing up, race, and family through a scene-centered lens, in sparse, concise language. Smith places you right in the moment of it and then pulls you back up, into her own head, before dropping you back in again. “Self-Portrait As The Letter Y” stands out as a primary example of Smith’s precise strategy and control of language: threads on a loom. Smith confronts that strange line between innocence and maturity: “The language you taught me rolls / From your mouth into mine / The way kids will pass smoke / Between them. You feed it to me / Until my heart grows fat. I feed you / Tiny black eggs. I feed you / My very own soft truth. We believe.” It feels pertinent that these lines should come from her very first collection: the distance between the Smith of then and the Smith of now comes to life effortlessly in this vision of innocence and its impending loss.

In selections from her second collection, Duende, Smith continues to raise her voice to new heights. The opening poem, “History”, opens with: “This is a poem about the itch / That stirs a nation at night. / This is a poem about all we’ll do / Not to scratch—”. The entire collection follows in this lineage, this urge not to scratch an itch growing increasingly exigent. This itch is the wrongness with which history is always laced. The poem is America, but not America as savior, as hero, as chosen one. Smith holds in her hands the America she sees, and that so many have always seen: America which is not free for everyone, America withholding. Smith writes an epic, invoking the classics by condensing hundreds of years of history into sharp, lyrical sentences, withholding no blame. Smith divides the timeline into The New World, The Occupation. She describes the importance of the poem: “There are secret police / Who don’t want the poem to continue, / But they’re not sure / It is important enough to silence.”

The table of contents for the section Life On Mars feels like a poem in and of itself: “My God, It’s Full of Stars”; “The Universe is A House Party”; “The Museum of Obsolescence”. Smith takes a step closer with these poems. A far cry from the sweeping , historical, social emphasis of Duende, Smith strangely intertwines the largeness of the universe with the personal, the single center of her own soul. The poems of Life On Mars are fraught with questions that Smith doesn’t bother answering: instead she dances around them with such elegance that the question itself becomes the spectacle, no need for fruition. “And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure / That someone was there squinting through the dust, / Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only / To be wanted back badly enough?” Smith writes in “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” The poem traces a series of so many questions asking after a place for humans in wide, uncomprehending universe. It is the emotional core of this collection, that speculating on both the self and the larger universe.

Having explored youth, history, and the universe, Smith turns her focus to religion in her most recent collection, Wade In The Water. (Though of course, Smith’s reverence for the political and American always makes its home here.) It is in this collection that Smith becomes most experimental with form, playing with the white space around the page. She also employs more of a narrative structure, stepping closer to her subjects than ever before. The narratives, coupled with her invoking of the religious, come to a head in Smith’s gritty depiction of the holy in “The Angels”. Perhaps it has been done before, to place two angels across a playing card table in a seedy motel, but Smith makes it feel brand-new. The speaker is haunted by these angels, sees them in the night sky and houses she passes each day after. “A rust-stained pipe / Where a house once stood, which I / Take each time I pass it for an owl. / Bright whorl so dangerous and near.” Smith confronts the holy and the earthly with equal nerve: those devastating consequences of mortality after having glimpsed the other side of things. It follows you, Smith asserts, that brush with the holy and with something more. “My mother sat whispering with it / At the end of her life / While all the rooms of our house / Filled up with night.”

 In “Riot: New Poems,” Smith debuts her newest work. Just as each collection before it increased in scope, talent, and mastery of language, the works of “Riot” further accentuate Smith’s growth in poetic exploration. It comes down to a feeling: a tug in the gut, a whispering to rise again after falling. It is rebellion but small rebellion, inner rebellion. “Riot: New Poems” is warfare with Smith’s signature delicacy. The poetry is delivered not from a single speaker but from a whole group, one large loud voice crying out that it will not be defeated. It is well-strengthened, it is sharp. Smith invokes her Blackness and calls upon the community to strengthen her voice and send it in waves. The result is magnificent: storm-like, poems stretching wide and terrible and great.  Smith carefully traces her lineage and presses her finger into old and still-gaping wounds in poems such as “Photo of Sugarcane Plantation Workers, Jamaica, 1891”. “I would be standing there, too.” Smith notes shrewdly, “I would want to live so badly / I would wreck myself trying to / cradle that speck of something / that weighs and sits / and turns and grows and / cries out to itself, cries out / Lord! or No!” The desperation is palpable, the prodding desire to reach inside a moment and to stop it, to pull those suffering out of it, or merely to shiver at the confrontation of one’s own humanity in the throbbing truth that it is you, or your mother, or your child.It is evident why Smith is so widely lauded for her poetry, why she was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Breathtaking poems move in and out of her like air, her voice the perfect pitch to speak the words she needs to say. She is a delicate force of nature, turning every stone on the riverbank with equal expertise. The brilliance of Such Color is its ability to compile her magnificence into one single volume, and for that, it is indispensable. Every poem included in the collection, spanning the last twenty years of her career, holds a gem, carefully carved and so beautiful, catching the light brilliantly at all angles. If Tracy K. Smith is a voice for the current poetic generation, this volume is that voice personified: it is a master class in balancing delicacy and harshness and confronting modernity. Smith’s work as a whole only grows with each new release into something more important, more damning, and more gorgeous, and this collection honors that lineage expertly.