The Palms: Poems

The title poem in Charlie Smith's book The Palms, is one of my favorite poems of all time. Smith skillfully weaves an emotional tapestry over the warp of a detailed, ethereal description of Los Angeles that transports you there to feel the roiling of his inner seas. The poem beautifully paints LA bathed in such a "vivid capacious oceanic light" that it completely colors the narrator's perceptions of the city. Instead of looking at the world through rose colored glasses, this narrator's glasses are tinged with a "rotted unmanageable light." The palms "hung limply" like "small dark thoughts tethered at the end of reason's thick ropes." Is the narrator the palms, in limbo, hanging in "gratuitous solitude"? How often have we all felt like this, "stunned, stupid and helpless, overwhelmed" by our lives? Too many times, so much so that this poem cannot be overlooked by anyone who wants to read a great poem that uses the mirror of a place to reflect upon one's inner condition. I keep a copy of this poem on my desk and read it daily, just to remind myself of what great poetry is all about. As far as the rest of the book goes, no other poem quite makes as deep an impression on me as "The Palms," but certainly Smith's skill as a wordsmith and his great insights into the human condition are well worth reading. He likes to skirt off the edge of reality a bit and when he does, there are some surprising results. For example, in "My Parents' Wedding" the narrator details the loveliness of a wedding, "I cannot believe how beautiful they are," so when he delivers the punchline, it is we who cannot believe. Or in "The Day Race," love and life, with all its triumphs and losses, is compared to a car race: "the dull, half crumpled cars flinging the metal-shouldered flesh into the far turn." We are all in the day race, some "who love speed, who love the wild thunder of the cars bearing down on us here" and others "who love the soft lunacy of silence that comes soon enough out of the windy trees." But in the end, we all "rise to our feet screaming, alive, as we always were at the heart of the world." Some of Smith's poems are strangely violent or repulsive like "Carnivore," which is about a man who wants to "step off the path" and imagines himself as a forest creature with "bright teeth snapping and tearing an old piece of flesh." "The Bad Daughter" is an oedipal poem that wistfully chronicles a mother's dementia in which she mistakes her son as her lover. It's sad, but she just stares at the "distant entirely untroubled bay," heedless of her plight. I particularly like "The Viewing," which is about a girl who discovers her father dead and opens his eyes "to see what death looked like, to be amazed at life, now flown." What Charlie Smith does best is explore the human condition, especially that of love and the emotional life, in unconventional metaphoric ways, clearly showing and not just telling you his inner state. And he does so using beautifu