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Review by Karen J. Weyant (email)
When a reader ventures into a book by a well-known and accomplished poet, there are, of course, certain expectations. Perhaps, that reader expects a certain style or voice. Perhaps the material should be familiar or comfortable. I was that reader. When I picked up R.T. Smith's newest book, Outlaw Style, I wanted to revisit the south, its history, its music, its people--all subjects I have explored before in Smith's previous works, Brightwood and The Hollow Log Lounge. I was not disappointed. Smith conjures up ghosts that may sound vaguely familiar, but they are far from being echoes of the voices in his earlier works.
Following this poem, we hear the voices of others from Booth's short life. In One-Man Show, we listen to an actor display a sort of admiration for Booth mimicking him: "I touch up my mustache / with lamp black, as Booth did, and tighten the silk cravat," even as his wife questions his choice saying "What will people think? You expect applause?" In The Prophet Boston Corbett on Shooting Booth, Booth's killer fancies himself some sort of avenging angel and declares in the first line: "God touched my shoulder. I was chosen." Corbett may have felt blessed by his act, but it seems that the women in Booth's life have only been cursed. In Keepsake, we learn "of the many who wore clippings of his hair / in lockets because he had been their matinee" including Lucy Hale, the daughter of Senator Hale, who loved Booth:
And in Asia, we hear the voice of Booth's sister who says in a letter to her cousin Sophie, that "I never guessed at the plot nor heard him utter / anything of murder" but "I was not wholly in the dark." Her confession reveals a troubled man who for "so many / nights he slept on our sofa in those high boots / with sewn-in holsters and counseled strangers / in the parlor all ungodly hours." Finally, there is the voice found in Charm: Anna Surratt Tonry, 1900 who declares that "Everyone / Booth touched was doomed to suffer" and that "Our smiling villain brought us all to enduring harm." Certainly, Anna, whose mother Mary Surratt was hanged for being a part of the assassination conspiracy felt little empathy for Booth or his causes. And then there is the haunting Dar He, a poem I consider to be the most powerful piece in the whole collection. In this poem, "a lone listener to the antiphony of crickets" remembers the case of Emmett Till "nearly half a century" before. His thoughts, haunted by "a smashed body with one/eye gouged out and a bullet in his brain" and a mother who, wanting the world to see what was done to her son, requested "an open-casket funeral." He is also haunted by the memory of the trial and a lone witness: "the old man--a great uncle / really--fought back his sobs and pointed at the accused / his finger like a pistol for the heart. 'Dar he' / he said..." Stalked by his own memories and his personal demons, the speaker contemplates his own parents: "though in their eighties they have no love / for any race darker than a tanned Caucasian." Clearly there is something that triggers the speaker's memory of the past, of his own memories, of the prejudice found in his own family, but it is not until the end of the poem that we learn that it is from the whispers of the forest around him:
This quiet humming of personal memory, history and nature turns louder towards the end of the book, with many of the poems in the last section dedicated to music. If at the beginning of this book I was straining to hear the sounds of the past mixed in with nature, then at the end I was almost tapping my foot, trying to match the music found in the lyrical narratives. In Gypsy Fiddle the persona admires an instrument that "can chuckle like a hen / mimic rain or lure the train sound / from a distant ravine." In The Carter Scratch, the poet commemorates Maybelle Carter, whose "fingers were deft but leathered / from scraping in the hardscrabble earth / to snatch choke weeds from the bean vines" and the music she made famous: "she improvised an outlaw style" that would influence country music forever. And in Plantation of the Mad (subtitled Blues for Buddy Bolden), the poet celebrates the life and music of a New Orleans cornet player. Seemingly lost in music history, Bolden was institutionalized in a mental asylum by the time he was 30. Still, the description of his music, perhaps laced with society's definition of insanity, is breathtaking:
If you have read R.T. Smith's other works, then you may find that the content and style of Outlaw Blues is nothing really new. In other words, this work is familiar ground. Like his other collections, Smith strives to capture the past of the south, however beautiful, violent, or disturbing this past may be. These past voices are worth hearing. Sometimes they come as the songs of birds, sometimes in the twang of a musical instrument. Indeed, whatever form, I would say that these are voices that need to be heard. ___________
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