Nobody Jackknife Ellen McGrath Smith 9780991074280 Books
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With insight, humor, and uncompromising honesty, Nobody's Jackknife explores power and powerlessness, violence and tenderness, addiction and love. These poems refuse to separate the mundane from the profound Rolling Rock beer, the racial coding of baseball players, and a melodic litany of yoga asanas intertwine in this brilliant and compelling collection. In 1960s Pittsburgh, a young girl finds her way to adulthood in a family dominated by a hard-drinking, blue-collar father, brothers who excel at baseball and machismo, and a pervasive but ultimately distant Catholicism. Her mother, unable to rescue her, offers two lifelines reading and yoga. Using an astonishing array of poetic styles, Ellen McGrath Smith shows a rare gift for subtlety, an expansive intellect, and a sometimes brutal candor in this groundbreaking debut collection.
Nobody Jackknife Ellen McGrath Smith 9780991074280 Books
Ellen McGrath Smith's first poetry collection ranges over drinking, alcoholism, growing up, men, women, baseball, yoga. There are poems that speak about loneliness, about love, about yearning for a father's love. The poems read easily, but only because the poet has mastered her craft. Their content is usually serious and often dark. From the poem titled "A Local Joan of Arc":She's never known man; if she has, she's
stood off from their pumping
and dogged but brief
ruminations.
For there is a king that she needs
to restore. Some have called him her father,
but that is impossible; that man's in jail.
But the man who put the needle in her arm
that first night, he spoke of his plan
for a peaceable kingdom.
The excellent opening piece ("The Locust: A Foundational Narrative") is the longest, and ranges flexibly from conventional poetry to prose poetry, encompassing locusts in three forms (tree, insect, and yoga pose), always rooted in the narrator's experience. Many of the sections deal with the narrator's father, who once pitched semi-pro baseball, and I found them very powerful:
She'll tell me he might have gone on to the
pros. That it stopped somewhere. He's dead,
so I can't ask him to show me the chalk
lines, the choices, the place where he
dropped the ball.... He never came to my
softball games, though I did pitch. I had a
spinner, and I took the act of pitching very
seriously. When I was on the mound, there was
a force-field around me of atoms charged with
both my hope and my failure.
A good arm. I'd have liked him to tell me I had one.
Other favorites of mine in the collection include "The Annunciation," "February Was Only Half Over," and "Corona: The Apples in Winter."
Importantly for me, these poems have character, and, often, narrative. I liked them very much, and, reading them, felt I would like the poet too.
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Tags : Nobody's Jackknife [Ellen McGrath Smith] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. With insight, humor, and uncompromising honesty, <em>Nobody's Jackknife </em>explores power and powerlessness,Ellen McGrath Smith,Nobody's Jackknife,West End Press,0991074289,General,POETRY American General,POETRY General,Poetry,PoetryWomen Authors
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Nobody Jackknife Ellen McGrath Smith 9780991074280 Books Reviews
Like a good yoga pose, Ellen McGrath Smith’s collection “Nobody’s Jackknife” mixes effort and ease; the book is structured but Smith knows exactly where to let go.
The book is split alcoholism and yoga, mother and father, searching for and finding love. The first half of the book grapples with addiction (alcoholism) and the second dedication (to her yoga practice.) However, Smith doesn’t let the structure overwhelm the book. For example, there are a number of poems named after specific drinks in the book’s first half, but also poems like “The Annunciation.” (“What flag can a teenager girl fly that isn’t already translucent,/x-rayed by the sun, its diurnal laws, golden gavels, ramrod/ pillars of heat and becoming?)
Having a looser structure allows for a greater emotional range and an acknowledges of the complexity of human experience. In addition to covering a lot of thematic ground, Smith works in many different forms—both received and of her own invention. What knits the book together is the assured voice of a poet who has studied her craft. With the vogue of project books, it’s refreshing to receive a debut by a poet who doesn’t rely on a concept to hold her book together.
She writes “Let the joints open, sad lockets holding strands of loss;” “The lime-pitched traffic birds in the morning/on the branches of your nerves;" and “While tasting what only the lonely/who love their aloneness can taste.”
Her command of craft is evident in her astonishing similes and metaphors “When we’d leave the bars and head home on weeknights, there was a sadness downtown like after a parade;” “The heels exposed, the unprotected soles--/ bulbs of daffodils in snow.”
The book has a quiet interiority. In “Camel Pose” she describes how “blood drained/through the C-curve of my neck to my/ skull, steeping all my fears.”
Then suddenly, the gaze shifts outwards and the book seems to open its arms to the world, to the “city, lit up/perpetual twenty-four-seven.”
Because the book moves in and out like a lung, it is a satisfying read. This volume is full of poems readers will want to return to such as “A Local Joan of Arc” “Voices say God set the curtains on fire/ that she might go forth, pull the animals out/ of the brush on both sides of the road/ and raise arms of them—opossum.”
Smith write. “My soul is a clementine/and has to be enjoyed as a whole case of clementines,/and if you can’t make that commitment in these times…I understand.”
I urge you to make the commitment to encounter these poems, which are “large tides in which a small soul/swims.”
This is a wonderfully complete collection with a satisfying range of forms. I most appreciated the way syntax and line endings offered surprise. I sensed the presence of a careful observer expressing a vision of the holy in the everyday. Most of all, these poems were thick with contemplation, never rushed, but taking their devastating time.
Ellen McGrath Smith's first poetry collection ranges over drinking, alcoholism, growing up, men, women, baseball, yoga. There are poems that speak about loneliness, about love, about yearning for a father's love. The poems read easily, but only because the poet has mastered her craft. Their content is usually serious and often dark. From the poem titled "A Local Joan of Arc"
She's never known man; if she has, she's
stood off from their pumping
and dogged but brief
ruminations.
For there is a king that she needs
to restore. Some have called him her father,
but that is impossible; that man's in jail.
But the man who put the needle in her arm
that first night, he spoke of his plan
for a peaceable kingdom.
The excellent opening piece ("The Locust A Foundational Narrative") is the longest, and ranges flexibly from conventional poetry to prose poetry, encompassing locusts in three forms (tree, insect, and yoga pose), always rooted in the narrator's experience. Many of the sections deal with the narrator's father, who once pitched semi-pro baseball, and I found them very powerful
She'll tell me he might have gone on to the
pros. That it stopped somewhere. He's dead,
so I can't ask him to show me the chalk
lines, the choices, the place where he
dropped the ball.... He never came to my
softball games, though I did pitch. I had a
spinner, and I took the act of pitching very
seriously. When I was on the mound, there was
a force-field around me of atoms charged with
both my hope and my failure.
A good arm. I'd have liked him to tell me I had one.
Other favorites of mine in the collection include "The Annunciation," "February Was Only Half Over," and "Corona The Apples in Winter."
Importantly for me, these poems have character, and, often, narrative. I liked them very much, and, reading them, felt I would like the poet too.
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