sla book review: moon road

moon road

Reviewed by Robert Hamblin

NOVEMBER 25, 2008 archive

Moon Road

During the two decades I served as poetry editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, I was always delighted to receive an envelope from Ron Smith, since I knew it would contain excellent poems guaranteed to appear in future issues of the journal. Thus, I opened his Moon Road: Poems, 1986-2005, with a great deal of curiosity and expectation, since I anticipated that I would find poems ranging far beyond the subject of sports. And I was not disappointed. There are only two poems in this volume that would meet the "sports-related" criterion for publication in Aethlon (and I would gladly have accepted both for publication): "Objectivity," a marvelous dialogue between a teacher and a track star who hasn't completed his homework assignment; and "When I Was Eight," a description of a canoe trip a son takes with his father. Nevertheless, all of the poems in the book, taken as a whole, describe contests of a sort, sporting conflicts of the most significant kind-those presented to us by life and time and experience.

Like its title phrase, this book is about oppositions and paradoxes: past vs. present, youth vs. age, love vs. hate, ideal vs. real, here vs. there, history vs. myth, life as lived vs. life as recollected and celebrated in poetry. The content is as wide-ranging as the themes: there are poems about childhood, home, and family; about journeys the poet makes to England, Italy, Greece, and the Holy Land; about reflections on authors, books, and historical events. And all are treated with a photographic eye for minute detail and a philosophical mind that seeks, even if it never quite finds, a deeper meaning beyond-or rather, within-the everyday and the mundane. Given this latter quest, it is not at all surprising that one of the most impressive poems in the book ("The Southern Poet Reads Emerson") deals with Emerson, quoting the famous line from Nature: "Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts." But the speaker, the Southern poet who is more an existentialist than a transcendentalist, is not altogether persuaded. "Bullshit, he thinks"; yet he also confesses that "He loves Emerson / the way his granddaddy loved / indoor plumbing, the way he loves / his own body. . . ." One of the strengths of Moon Road is the unflinching honesty with which Smith treats the harsh, ugly realities-as in "Repairs," with its descriptions of the heavy-drinking father whose "eyes … hated everything / that needed fixing"; the sadness of the mother with her "annual apology / for going on and on about things she cannot change"; and the boy's remembered past in which "the soft earth stinks and the night / is full of whispers." Another example is found in the long, ironic, anti-romantic narrative sequence "To Ithaca": "A fighter jet trails a dirty tail / over the island. The deck below me / looks like Doomsday: bodies in body bags, / twisted faces, contorted figures tangled / among giant bolts, some moaning softly, / whimpering, like souls about to wake / wailing in the underworld." Still another example is "The Soldiers Caught the Boys Near the Top of the Hill," which includes: "One held up the fat boy's left arm and another struck it / with a stone God / had provided. He worked up to the shoulder, / then back down to the elbow. / A few blows along the forearm. Wrist, hand, fingers. / Then back up." The reader cannot help but think of Emerson again: what sermons, one wonders, would the sage find in these stones? Occasionally, this foulness that is an undeniable part of reality is treated humorously, as in "Via Appia" when the protagonist and his wife find themselves staying overnight in "a crappy place" with a window opening upon a chained, filthy elephant: "Delores, glummer and glummer, hisses: 'It stinks here.' / 'That's because / there's an elephant right beside you.'" As the reader is soon told, the elephant represents "the whole world's jumbo stench."

But there is another, more positive side to Smith's treatment of reality in Moon Road. The two epigraphs that Smith chooses for his volume are from Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and Thoreau seems a better index to these poems than Emerson. Thoreau believes as much as Emerson in deeper meanings, but Thoreau is more Aristotelian than Platonic; thus, his reality is less transcendent, more imminent, earthly, than Emerson's. Smith, too, implies in these powerful poems that authentic existence and meaning are not to be found in grand, overarching concepts and -isms-or on the other side of the world-but in personal, concrete experiences, in the midst of all the mire and muck of living-and close to home. For me, there is truth in all these poems (though that truth seems always problematic, never absolute), but the beauty is found primarily in the poems that deal with the small, priceless moments: a family seeing a soldier off to war, childhood friends building a treehouse, a father repairing his son's truck, parents teaching a son to drive, conversation with a Greek bartender who wants to go to America, a couple making love on a rainy day, and (the final poem) a father and son taking a long-deferred canoe trip together. These are the moments and the actions that remind one, as Smith notes in "Sickle," "of life giving / way to those who fill themselves with a beauty / that will keep them alive for a little while."

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