The one who kept walking

Austin Smith: Flyover Country

In my last missive, I noted that I picked up several books from The Strand. One of these is Flyover Country, by Austin Smith. I’ve been parsing through it over and again, with growing admiration each time.

The title of the book is a reference to Smith’s upbringing on a farm in the rural upper midwest. Many of the most distinctive poems are situated there, but their allure lies not only in the way he portrays the landscape but in how he conveys a sense of awe at the natural world, along with his touching and complicated (though never quite resolved) relationship with his father. These include poems such as “The Windbreak,” “Hired Hands,” “Water Witching,” and “The Vampire,” (this last an intriguing revisionist history of a childhood episode or memory). Nonetheless, Dorothy leaves Kansas at some point to become rather cosmopolitan, traipsing through Barcelona, Lourdes, Amsterdam, and Asheville.

Though distinctive, the poems in this book seemed remarkably referential, with styles or themes reminding me of other works. For example, the introductory poem, “Lena,” is a sort of epistolary narrative explaining how to reach a particular town—or perhaps, an imagined state or remembered past. It’s hard to read it without thinking of Frost’s “Directive.” Similarly, the title “Country Things” seems a direct nod to Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Many poems also eschew punctuation, and though they do not fall within the Deep Image or Surrealist mode, they nonetheless display the influence of Merwin. “White Lie” describes the poet’s father spreading hay on Christmas Eve, a ruse to fool the young children into believing that reindeer had stopped in the night; the sense of childlike wonder and the desire to believe (or let others believe) in miracles brought me back to Hardy’s “The Oxen.” Then of course, “Film of the Building of a Coffin Viewed in Reverse” seems to take a cue from Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.

Migrating if they sensed the seasons were turning
Against them.
When I walked into the forest
of camouflage…
…the words
Pearl Harbor over the jets
Of milk ringing in the pail.