Charlie Smith is the sort of poet you wish were a blogger—and I mean this as a serious compliment. Maybe this seems like paltry praise for someone who has already authored six novels and five previous books of poetry, won National Endowment from the Arts grants and Guggenheim fellowships, and whose work regularly appears in major literary magazines, but, hey, a good blog is hard to find. And in a world crammed with people eager to dissect every detail of their days publicly, we could actually use someone like Smith who knows how to draw the universal out of the personal, a trick that seems to elude many. Smith’s new book of poems, Women of America, is not unlike the ideal blog—that air of casual but precise observation, the conversational tone, a hint of universality, and the strange appeal of gaining intimate windows into the mind of someone whom you’ve never met and yet whose mind you feel, by the end, that you somehow know.

Smith’s title refers to a personal history of nameless, faceless past women—these are romantic relationships for the most part, but there are also sisters, a mother, even women observed from afar. There is something sweeping and non-particular in his recollections of lost women, something shadowy and yet preoccupying that is captured well in the title poem, which begins: “On the pale morning I left town/ I was thinking about women,/ and later, in the Rockies where work was scarce,/ I thought of women all day…” Or similarly in the first ten his poem “July:”

In July when meat smoke
fills the town,
that’s when I think
of you. And June, too,
I thought of you in June.
And all the months before that.
A string of time’s divisions, all
of the inky
with little dots where I
thought of you. (l. 1-10)

As in this poem, we rarely learn any real details of these women of America, but rather we see them as the collective focus of Smith’s mixed nostalgia, awe, and regret.

Like a blogger, Smith is honest and almost intentionally mundane, describing his walks, rubbing his belly, what he’s reading—and then sudden aching musings as this, “Dearest, they are tearing/ down the movie theaters--/ blackened areas in which/ we clutched each other,/leaving marks.” Here is something so specific, and yet so identifiable. There are arguments in these poems, regret, and Smith writes with frankness, accepting both the blame and inevitability of romantic discord. He has an off-kilter way of describing things that lends his descriptions of the ordinary their potency. Here-in lies another reason why you’d love his blog—the stories he tells are not necessarily new, the details not particularly unique, but Smith’s take on them are unusual. In one of his loveliest poems, “There’s Trouble Everywhere,” he begins:

There the blind man and his personal dark,
dawn like an emission between buildings,
arrested in the street a second,
meline, no, saffron, a puckish, dilute yellow
and uncontrollable like the light in
a Lorrain painting (l 1-6)

This passage is Smith at his best—powerful description paired with an ever-present sense of bittersweet irony; here is the full-color description of a blind man, a subject without vision bathed in the language of light.

Later in the same poem, Smith says “The day/ refers to itself in third person, like the grinning maniac/ who greets you as if he knows you.” This is another Smithian tactic, this creation of precarious, strange metaphors. Day is a maniac, love is trees, cravings are baskets of fresh linen, emotional ineptitude is someone struggling up from a bed… These metaphors both strain credulity and yet make for delicious word casserole. Perhaps my only complaint is that sometimes in such pronouncements, Smith goes a bit too far. Lines like “And sometimes I think the sunset/ hates the darkening houses,” seem to me like something said merely for effect, for the Gnostic man-on-the-mountain, received wisdom of it. There are other similar moments where Smith’s abstract comparisons have the koan-like feel of remarks best left to brooding, adolescent, intellectual bad-boys at academically-gifted summer camps. Just because the sound of a phrase is mysterious doesn’t always make it work within a poem.

Overall, though, Smith’s excellent reputation is well-deserved, and this book, with its aching yet understated regret, is something to be savored. Much to his credit, Smith writes about sadness in a way that is never over-dramatized. There are no theatrics in these poems, only a very real feeling that can be seen in one of Smith’s excellent shorter poems, in its entirety below:

Ceremonies
…way to put it, seasonal change,
celebration, duck roasting in wine sauce,
the taste of sweet potatoes still in your mouth
when you step out, the afternoon drifting off,
fog on the pond, a New England day in Georgia,
love disputed and continued with, you think
the spiritual life is—what did they say?—
the experience of hashing it out with reality,
that’s good, but a somberness in you
nonetheless, a sadness, her soft hand,
the way she knelt with you
to look into her aunt’s chest of drawers
at the glass figurines, hundreds of them,
the old woman in another room just dead.

The mouth full of sweet potatoes, the drawer of glass figurines, the speaker’s observation of fog on the pond, the death, only mentioned in the last line, occurring during the holidays—this is the way regret unfolds not with flare but slowly. This is Smith’s gift—the unassuming diary-entries of a blogger, forged into emotionally resonant poetry.