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.

Smith has an uncanny knack for metaphor and simile, often piling one atop another. What impresses is not simply the aptness of the comparison but the unexpectedness. He sees a dead tree and notes “the tambourines / of its dry leaves.” In another poem, he notices an old man’s hands “shaking with the loaded dice of age.” A living-statue street performer opens her eyelids “like the wings / of a housefly who’s flown into paint.” A psychological wound (PTSD?) is described, “drifting around inside his body, bouncing / under his skin like a man swimming under ice, / Desperate to find the place where he fell through.” The arc of metaphor reaches its apogee in “Break in the Weather,” which describes worms on the sidewalk after a rain without ever actually using the word “worm.” Instead, we get “hieroglyphics / scrawled pinkly on the walk,” “marks / of punctuation in some lost lexicon,” passers-by “mashing this exquisite language / into pink pulp.”

The book is divided into sections, though I was unable to determine the sorting criteria, other than to note that the middle section contains most of the political poems. In this section, Smith grapples with a problem common to all modern poets—how to be political without being polemical (OK, many American poets seem quite happy with the polemical, but I generally find such poems rather artless). He succeeds, I believe, by remaining oblique. Many were apparently written during or in response to the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, though they are more broadly relevant. “The Bombing of Hospitals,” casts a disparaging eye at indiscriminate bombing by suggesting a time when even nations at war could agree on certain humanitarian terms of engagement. The poem is even more timely right now, in light of Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas command centers in Palestine. There’s “Swatting Flies,” which is, I suspect, a reference to G. W. Bush’s single-minded intention to invade Iraq, because he was, according to Condi Rice, “tired of swatting at flies.” Then there’s “That Particular Village,” assembled from actual quotes from DefSec Rumsfeld about the unintentional destruction of an entire village. “The Witness Tree” (which bears some tonal similarities to Merwin’s “The Last One”) engages with the “enhanced interrogation” practices in the GWOT. “We Defy Augury” deals with more recent current events, and is an attempt to come to grips with the election of Trump in 2016. The title is a reference to Hamlet, but it is appropriate both because the Trump campaign was just so damned defiant and dismissive of conventional wisdom (and the rules of good taste) and did indeed prove many pollsters to be dead wrong.

This last poem brings me to something else I love about Smith’s poetry—his deft use of enjambement and line breaks. Here, the birds of augury would start

“The Only Tavern in Hyde, Wisconsin” begins:

In “Three Radios,” a man milking cows listens a new report, and hears:

In all these instances, note how the meaning of the last word in a line changes abruptly based on the first word of the next line. There are wonderful instances of this throughout the book.

Smith also has a capacious store of history, and introduces figures both famous and not, such as Claude Eatherly, who gave the all-clear for the bombing of Hiroshima; Rachel Carson, the groundbreaking environmentalist; and Chekhov and Nietzsche, who are perhaps formative influences in his work. There are endnotes, but I confess I had to do a bit of background reading to fully grasp the details.

Perhaps my favorite poem in the book is “The Spider,” which begins as a light-hearted (though dark-themed) musing on the loneliness of life from a spider’s perspective. The spider is delighted when something snags in its web, and rushes over “as if to help” before spinning it round in its silk cocoon until its cries are completely muffled. Then comes the fabulous conclusion, with the spider sighing, “Then I am lonely again, / A poet between poems.” I have to wonder if the entire poem was conceived as a metaphor for writing, or whether that ending was an unplanned invention. Genius either way.

There is a great deal to admire in this book. My only critique is that it is fairly long—there are nearly 60 poems in this collection. And while they all had something to recommend them—a great image, unusual metaphor, engaging language—there were some that left me scratching my head. I believe a few could have been removed to let the others shine all the brighter. A minor quibble, after all—I’m essentially saying Smith has given us too much of a good thing!