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Reviewed by Philip Daughtry
Insanity is never so disturbing as when it makes sense. Rick Smith's recent work "Whispering in a Mad Dog's Ear" (Lummox Press) illuminates a uniquely American madness with its blend of ashcan reality, lyric surrealism and realized experience. Many of these poems ride an edgy territory of risks like a dusty outlaw in a serape playing harmonica to demons and angels. Smith has fast hands capable of settling a tricky poem with
the right line
where magic turns dread
inside out
achieving truth courageously elevating Smith's poetry into a territory elegantly reflective of hard won lyric intelligence and sure language.
Americans become outsiders almost as soon as they practice an allegiance to poetry. Alienation became an artist's badge of honor a long time before gasoline but it is how we wear our badge of sensibility that separates victims from the brave....Snyder, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Corso and Robert Bly among many, come to mind. Rick Smith does well in their company. His poems never whine, rather they travel the American landscape with an open heart that knows all too well how America as any demon lover
.... can tear you apart
with a kiss of indifference.
It's the best
you can hope for.
The title of one poem (A Necklace Made of Water) struck me as a fitting torc for warrior poets whose lives are openly flayed and revealed through honest work. In a few spots revelation is reduced to psychological analysis but by far the primary attainment of Rick Smith' craft is toward liberation.
As he insists, even
out where darkness is a hungry dog and poetry starts with a rope ladder tossed into darkness
nonetheless
Every man must carry his sleepy child
out under the night sky
to count stars and planets
out loud
to remember there is a vast heaven
swimming in those wide
and tiny globes.
I enjoyed traveling Whispering in a Mad Dog's Ear's existential cosmos, especially how its spareness dances its riprap road of visceral imagery.