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Offers a collection of poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. This title includes poems that reflect on a long poetic apprenticeship.
List of contents
The Silo 5 Queen-Anne's Lace 7 Fort-Da 8 Thistles 10 The Night My Mother 11 How a Calf Comes into the World 13 Lightning 15 Autumn's Velocity 16 The Brinkmeiers 19 Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972 20 Dean 22 Coach Chance 24 The Man Accused of Fucking Horses 25 The Bait Shop 26 Memoir of My Imaginary Sister 27 Neon Apotheosis 28 Bingo 31 Stephenson County Fair in Wartime 33 Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 34 Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb 35 The Battlefield 37 The Pit 39 The Man Who Poisoned Robert Johnson 40 Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants 41 Sharpener of Knives 43 Overlord 45 The Hotel 48 The Equation 50 Resonance 51 Postcards to Andrew Wyeth 52 Recollection 54 Letter to My Father Written in a Bar in Mitchell, South Dakota 55 On a Greyhound Bus in America 56 Mission 57 The Scythe 58 The Mummy in the Freeport Art Museum 59 Sirens 60 A Serious House on Serious Earth 61 Poem for Les, Homeless 63 Elegy for Missing Teeth 65 Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips 66 The Trencher 68 Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down 71 The Key in the Stone 73 Wake 75 Notes 79 Acknowledgments 81
About the author
Austin Smith was born in the rural Midwest. Most recently, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.
Summary
The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry
Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.
This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.
From Almanac:
THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM
Austin Smith
Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town
Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs
of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks
or the molds of busts donated by the Art
Institute of Chicago to this dying
town's little museum, there was a mummy,
a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit
room by himself. I used to go
to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh
who, expecting an afterlife
of beautiful virgins and infinite food
and all the riches and jewels
he'd enjoyed in earthly life,
must have wondered how the hell
he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois.
And I used to go alone into that room
and stand beside his sarcophagus and say,
"My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."
Additional text
"Smith's farm disasters make memorable reading if you care about poetry whether or not you care very much about farms."---Stephanie Burt, Yale Review
