A Review of Smoke by Kevin Nance

Smoke by Kevin Nance is a full-length collection of poems held together by imagery, theme, and attention to form. Some of the strongest poems in this collection are composed as a series of numbered haiku, the effect of which reminds me of Wallace Stevens. The collection as a whole explores time, liminal spaces (“the thin space between this world & the next”), the ephemeral  (“I want your translucent, tessellated wings, / the light beneath them lavender / as if passing through windows in churches”).

“Photographer’s Paradiso,” a poem written in seven stanzas of three lines each, might be my favorite. Though lyrical, the poem narrates the snapping of a photograph. Significantly, the story is both typical:

It’s always
early morning or late
afternoon 

and also specific:

a stranger waits
till you’re ready 
before busting a move

on the street,
his face drunk 
with joy, his head

flung back
at just the right angle 

I love its movement, its momentum. Written in one sentence, the poem’s power derives from the contrast between the driving motion of the sentence and the stillness of (still) photography. No surprise that Nance is a professional photographer. 

Much of the collection explores time implicitly; however, “Daybook,” a numbered series of seven haiku (suggesting one week) placed in the final section titled “Afterward” references time explicitly: “Late at night … For twenty-four hours … After lunch … This rainy morning.” 

The poem opens:

Streets almost empty.
Late at night they haunt me now,
those wailing sirens.

and ends:

This rainy morning
I watch you turn a corner
& like that, you’re gone.

Loss is a typical theme of poetry; however, this collection seems to focus on absence rather than loss.

Reminiscent of volume one of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, “Ice” teeters between longing and denial:

There must be a way …

… I can look you
in the eye & say
I don’t want you anymore
& believe 
that every word is true.

The opening section of the book, “Homecoming,” consisting largely of unsentimental narrative poems, grounds the collection in at working-class past in the American South. “Mouths to Feed” presents a mother raised on a North Carolina sugar farm, a father raised on a South Carolina tobacco farm. Harvesting both sugar and tobacco is back-breaking labor, formerly performed by southern slaves and more recently by migrant immigrants. In contrast to unquestioned labor in tobacco by the speaker of these poems is the childhood love of books. “The Napkins” explores social class through a series of napkins: cloth, paper, and the absence of any form of napkins. The reappearing image of smoke through tobacco, cigarettes, cancer, and death culminates in the implicit spirituality of the collection as revealed by the titular poem, “Smoke”: 

It rises from the ashes … 

It sighs like the souls leaving the body at death.