River Skin by Darcy Smith
“Finely-honed and whetted, Smith’s lines are as sharp and clean as fishbones, pliantly molded into shapes both formal and inventive. ”
River Skin, Darcy Smith’s first collection of poetry, roils through a downriver landscape of maple-lined roads, rust-covered tractors, and rose-wallpapered homes, its bucolic beauty casting the near-constant undercurrent of domestic trauma into high relief. In these pages, the untimely and timely deaths of loved ones, the slow violence of addiction, aggressions and microaggressions, are a pernicious cycle of learned behavior.
It’s locus of concerns loosely surround family and home, mapped in five sections that navigate childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, marriage, and motherhood. Despite the tragedies the main character endures, like Beckett, her mantra seems to be “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” In poems like “Ode to Brigit,” one ascertains that it is only through the alchemy of art—the writing of these poems—that Smith discovers what seems unbearable and what is actually unbearable-are two different things.
In other words, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In Smith’s kitchen, people eat supper, not dinner, and leftovers are snapped into Tupperware to be repurposed tomorrow. Like in the television show “Chopped,” Smith is tenacious and creative at making the most of the ingredients she is given, no matter how random and unfair they may seem. When a given form (recipe), won’t hold the words (ingredients) together, Smith creates her own, allowing words to act like binders, elevating each other through synthesis and judiciously applied heat. Energy crackles through these poems that let us see how the sausage gets made, and while it might not always be pretty, the end result is not only savory but mouth-wateringly good.
As trauma often shatters like a fine wine glass into a thousand near-invisible shards, so does Smith’s verse scatter into a kaleidoscope of prismatic, impossible shapes. Voracious in retrieving the bits and pieces, Smith glues them all back together, word by word, phrase by phrase, poem by poem, ultimately reintegrating her experiences into things made more interesting by the cracks that heal but can never be completely concealed.
Finely-honed and whetted, Smith’s lines are as sharp and clean as fishbones, pliantly molded into shapes both formal and inventive. Nouns masquerade as verbs, verbs as adjectives, scenes tantalize with fresh and surprising imagery, sonics tease, reverberate, and haunt. Moreover, these poems emanate tremendous empathy and a tender heart broken by a long procession of hard knocks. But like her river, Smith’s skin is elastic, finding solace in rustle of maples and oaks, the scent of lilacs, the wonder of lichens, the chatter of crickets, even the rust on the family tractor becomes salve for wound. Read this book and marvel at how raw, angry fissures miraculously mend to become supple and glossy, time and again, as Smith stops to observe, harken, and honor them.