The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith (2003)

The first book of poems by the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Poetry Review: The Body's Question is an amazing first book, and reassuring in that contemporary American poets are still writing poetry this wonderful. Tracy K. Smith creates within the great tradition of lyric poetry, yet her poems are fresh, individual, and contemporary (yet retro enough to capitalize every line). Too many poets today write poetry so opaque that it couldn't be deciphered by a CIA analyst. Or write poems so accessible there's little substance or meaning, like shower thoughts, like tumblr poetry. Smith writes real poetry (sorry, but true). She's a Romantic. Her poems can be timeless ("A Hunger So Honed") or as immediate and pointed as breaking news: "That's why women/Wear worry and cover their heads, let their words/Drop like shot birds from the higher windows./Every night here one of us is sliced open."

At heart, Smith describes a young woman seeing and enjoying what life has to offer, with her memories never too far from the surface. She has wonderful lines: "I woke, touching ground gently/Like a parachutist tangled in low branches." or "Lying beside you was like/Dangling a leg/Over the edge/Of a drifting boat." or "I have always been this beautiful/and this dead." Appropriately, the book begins with a "Serenade" and ends with a "Prayer." The word "hunger" is a drumbeat throughout the pages, covering everything from desire to ambition to need. The Body's Question includes love poems (many), memory poems, travel poems, confessional poems. The ghosts of the Spanish poets drift through. There's metaphor if you like that, but if you don't you can just kick back and enjoy the pyrotechnic imagery. The amount of work that went into these poems is astonishing. She constructs brilliant first and last lines, and then fills the in-between with revelatory pictures. It's not just that Smith is talented, clever and intelligent, but she knows, she knows what she's doing:

   Success must hurt. Must yield sharp evidence.
   I'll have to lie to get it.
                                              Like love.

Don't let Kevin Young's introduction turn you off, if it does; poets writing about poets can be something of a swamp (I'm currently reading his new books, Brown). If you want an excellent example of the best of contemporary poetry, The Body's Question is it.  [4★]