The Wick of Memory

In The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000, Dave Smith's poetry reveals as never before its roots in the elegiac tradition that has marked a southern literature that has been so prominent in the twentieth century. Yet equally visible, now, is the ancestral shadow of the Anglo-Saxon poetry from religious questing and the inner voyaging of dreams to the runic parables of nature and its implacable force. Smiths style is a gritty, ever realistic presentation of human dilemmas in a world both familiar to us all and eerily strange, a world where the actions of individual character and contests over the principles of grace, courage, and passion still matter.

Dave Smith is Boyd Professor of English and co-editor of The Southern Review at Louisiana State University.