Gulf Poems / Cody Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Cody, author.

Series:

The Sabine series in literature

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Louisiana.

Louisiana--Poetry.

Genre:

Elegies (Poetry)

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (85 pages)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

Place of Publication:

Huntsville : Texas Review Press, [2019]

Summary:

Gulf is one part ode and one part elegy to Smith's Louisiana. It is a book that, all at once, questions, praises, and eulegizes its muse. Smith's poetry works to elevate people, places, and things that are often looked over as unpoetic. Trailers, pickups, catfish, menial labor thread through Gulf . But ultimately, the book revolves around family and home. It moves back and forth between innocence and experience, the idyllic and tragic. In Gulf , the past shapes the poet, yet the poet, through so much that has been lost, has little else to access a past other than memory. Ultimately, Gulf becomes a reckoning with memory. These poems are the work of a poet leaving and losing his home, his family, his way of life. But they are not merely past-centric. Loss is a centrifugal force, an inciting incident that leads to the question,what is on the other side? What is left of a state that every year falls farther into the Gulf of Mexico? What is left when the poet moves three thousand miles away? What is it like to come home? Can the poet come home? What remains when the poet leaves? What is he able to bring with him? Though Smith's relationship to his home is not simple, his first urge is to praise; however, when home is a trailer on wheels in a state that continues to fall down farther into water, Gulf is a book of poems unable to escape the elegiac. The Sabine Series in Literature

Contents:

Ode for Delta summers

Louisiana wetland elegy taken out to sea

Elegy for a trailer hauled off and rotting somewhere in the deep South

Heat lightning

Hurricane parties

Flash flood, mid-August Baton Rouge

Eating fried chicken at Uncle Albert's resturant

Gulf state elegy unfolding under evacuation

Elegy for the pond

Elegy uprooted from the wet soil

Up and over the mountain

Picking up cans

Elegy for the family tractor

Elegy while working for cash landscaping

Going slow

Christmas elegy with a foot out the door

The faith healer comes for a summer revival

Before the quadruple bypass, the preacher comes to pray

Elegy with tocacco spit and Little Debbie cakes

For Edith, from the north country

On Thomas Wolfe's assertion of home after having lived a long time 3,000 miles away

Keats in LaSalle parish

Elegy unfolding as I leave Spokane, WA

Coming home: most things change except humidity

Front porch at 775 Hanger Road

Elegy with steel wool plugging holes

Elegy with dementia and the diaspora of family

Spending the summer back in Louisiana with all my stuff still in Washington

Spokane, WA

In the pasture between what was your granparents' house and aunt's house after they have all moved on

Job 13:21

Elegy with a brush hook and machete

Just music

Wreckage

Thatcher starts first grade

Elegy for delta summers.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-68003-203-8

OCLC:

1091239186