Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992-2004

By Dave Smith

Book Overview

A lyrical search for wisdom and meaning in the life of a man growing up in the New South of desegregating schools, rock-and-roll music, mobile populations, and volatile wars, Little Boats, Unsalvaged displays the profound historical sensibility that has long marked the poetry of Dave Smith. Smith exhibits here a mature perspective on his childhood in a racially violent society and on his troubled search for happiness, whether sexual, professional, or aesthetic. To that, he adds a chorus of elegies for poets central to his understanding of his native region--including Edwin Muir, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate--and a vision of poetry as the art that unites medieval and contemporary elements. Section by section, changes in subject, tempo, and even vocabulary offer at once a sense of unity and variety to the poems. Little Boats, Unsalvaged poses a polyphonic inquiry into the experiences and memories of the Vietnam-defined generation, an inquiry whose answers can only be tentative, fretted, hung in the contingencies of being just as the little boat of joy waits--not useless or lost, but abandoned and so beyond visible redemption.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807131067
• ISBN13: 9780807131060
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.5" x 9.0"