By: Jonathan Walker
In the titular poem of Clint Smith’s 2023 collection Above Ground, the speaker stands with his two children in the front yard of their home, listening to the songs of the cicadas. He sees the exoskeletons of the bugs, pictures his children growing out of their own young bodies, expands his imagination to how the world might have changed when next the cicadas return. Though the speaker’s mind is drawn to grand anxieties, Smith does not linger there. The joy of the poem comes in the image of the children scrambling to collect the cicadas “as if they are treasure.”
“And maybe they are,” Smith writes.
When reading collections of poetry like Smith’s, I tend to take it slow, perhaps taking a poem or two each night to think on and absorb. There was scarcely an evening that passed without one of Smith’s poems touching me with its quiet, everyday treasure. His writing is so vivid, so real, so readable.
The canvas on which Smith’s poetry plays is his own experience of fatherhood. He writes odes to bedtime, the double stroller, infant hiccups; he illustrates first birthdays, bathtimes, beach trips.
At the same time, Smith writes about news reports of school shootings and civilians killed in military airstrikes. He reflects on the American history of enslavement, how it wasn’t all that long ago that entire families were split across plantations. This is the world that this father has brought his children into.
Therein lies the central tension in Above Ground: the tenderness and joy of fatherhood contrasted with the unkind brutality of this world. Smith, however, does not try to resolve that tension. We as the readers sit with him in it.
Because that’s just life, isn’t it?
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