Jump Soul: New and Selected Poems

Poet and novelist Smith (Word Comix) opens with a generous offering of new poems before selecting from his seven previous collections. He finds beauty in past addictions and broken marriages, a teeming mesh of impenetrable wordiness, sorrow, and intricately textured environments. Smith explores regret while moving forward with equal abandon: “I’d walk out on myself if I could,” he writes in “Late Days.” His poems work best when stripped of their habit of big-word bravado: “sometimes what passes on from us/ has little to do with what we hoped, but nonetheless/ carries word of who we were and what we found.” Often compared to Charles Wright for his rich descriptions of place, Smith should also be acknowledged for his smart poetic turns—he often ends poems with an open door, an ominous or luminous cadence. “As For Trees” employs lush arboreal images as a loose timeline for the women he has known: “spatters of scarlet in the white, vague yellow musings, blue silk bits, rouged lip skin peeled off and crumpled up.” “Beds” echoes his dynamic movement through life: “nights of delightful smells,/ nights on the river, by the sea, inland nights/ spoken of in hushed voices, nights by the wayside,/ nights come to bed late for no reason.” (Mar.)