Often rhetorical questions are used to control a reader’s feelings, but in this book, they are asked either to God, or to endless tracts of space where they echo back or place pressure on the reader to come up with a response. The word “walk” is repeated as a verb and noun, and as a rhetorical question. Working in a range of forms, the poem (like most in the book) weaves hard-won wisdom with heartfelt observations it “worries” or bends the word “walk,” for example, in section three, as the speaker tries to come to terms with the cold hand of death, even as it celebrates the lessons delivered to her from the father, who exists in the hallways of her memory. The most demanding poem, the book’s masterpiece, is at its center, “The Speed of Belief,” and is focused on the death of the poet’s father, Floyd Smith.

For many of these, the speakers’ tones show dismay, wonder, awe, with an intelligent, questioning, dissatisfied, razor-sharp voice. Its themes include family births and deaths, outer space as a metaphor for inner space, and broader political questions regarding violence and power.

It’s not easy to be so convincing in both the grand gesture and the reverent contemplation of a humble plate of eggs, and the early successes of this collection far outweigh its later missteps.Tracy Smith’s Life on Mars is a strong, surprising, and often beautiful book.

In Life on Mars, Smith shows herself to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition. There are certainly some fine poems here - 'When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me' is a gorgeous and ecstatic sonnet - but after the intensity and focus of the opening sequences, some of these poems feel like also-rans. Life on Mars concludes with another group of poems on miscellaneous subjects, but here the concerns are more lighthearted, personal and domestic. Smith’s desire to write about injustice is commendable, but her approach can be haphazard. The end of Life on Mars is less successful than the beginning. Smith’s pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant. Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we’re alone in the universe it’s to accept - or at least endure - the universe’s mystery.

Life on mars k smith