![]() Smith’s hope is earned, however, through an unflinching look at history-the history of slavery, immigration, race, gender, and our sometimes wrenching psychic and social ordeals-warning us of misidentifications, and urging us to embrace the “stranger.” Smith writes of people who are made strange to us by the burial of time-black soldiers and their families during the American Civil War, held tenuously by their depositions and letters, which Smith revives and adapts into a series of haunting poems. ![]() ![]() We wept to be reminded of such color.” Should we believe these prophecies? We should certainly take notice when they arrive through such powerful poetry. The earth survives, diversity survives, we survive: “We took new stock of one another. And then our singingīrought on a different manner of weather. ![]() Echoing Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Smith bemoans a ravaged land and rising hate-the “worst in us having taken over / And broken the rest utterly down.” But after scraping rock bottom, the beast that wakes is hope. Smith’s fourth book of poetry ends with “An Old Story” of terrible times. ![]()
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