Goldenrod Poems

Smith (Good Bones) continues to explore her major subjects--America, grief, and her role as a mother--in her rewarding fourth collection, finding ways to celebrate the concrete and everyday while mourning violence and heartache, and weaving humor and hard-earned optimism throughout. The title poem opens self-deprecatingly: "I'm no botanist. If you're the color of sulfur/ and growing at the roadside, you're goldenrod." Elsewhere, she points out that autocorrect "doesn't observe/ the high holidays," changing "Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands." There are moments of serious and troubling reality, as in a poem that connects a nature documentary to the president calling undocumented immigrants "animals," or when she asks, pointedly without a question mark, "How do we live/ with trust in a world that will continue/ to betray us." The subsequent poem, "In the Grand Scheme of Things," ends "We say that's not how// the world works as if the world works." Smith ties in the craft of writing in various poems, giving it metaphorical significance: "How/ fragile it is, the world--I almost wrote/ the word but caught myself. Either one/ could be erased." This empathetic, wise, and honest collection is brimming with poems full of heart and feeling. (July)