Much has been made of Shenandoah editor R.T. Smith’s “Southern” voice and perspective. Margaret Gibson says of his 2004 collection, Brightwood:
Vernacular, down-home, these are poems given to remembering, and they make a faithful account. They find healing in a brightwood fiddle and in willowspout, gospel in the spoils of experience. . .
Smith’s poetry gracefully couples the simple observations of rural life to grander mysteries of history and religion. But I can’t help but wonder what’s uniquely Southern about that.
Smith’s poems should resonate with anyone who has lived in “country time,” on the slow and contemplative schedule of seasonal changes, no matter what part of the country they call home. “In the Night Orchard” feels like it could plausibly be my own memory – although I have never seen anything of the kind, it feels completely authentic. Yet I have never lived in the South; only in the West.
“In the Night Orchard”
R.T. Smith, BrightwoodI know, because Paul has told me
a hundred times, that the deer
gliding tonight through tangleweed
and trashwood, then bounding across
Mount Atlas road, are after his pears.And who could blame them?
On the threshold of autumn, the Asian
imports, more amazing than any seckle
or indigenous apple, start to ripen.
Then a passing crow will peck one open.That’s when the whitetails who bed
and gather beyond Matson’s pasture
will catch the scent and begin to stir.
It’s a dry time, and they go slowly mad
for sweetness. No fence can stop them.The farmers like Paul will admit
it starts in hunger, but how suddenly
need goes to frenzy and sheer plunder.
When the blush-gold windfalls are gone
and the low boughs are strippedof anything resembling bounty, bucks
will rise on their hind legs and clamber
up the trunks. Last week Cecil Emore
found one strangled in a fork,
his twisted antlers tangled as ifsome hunter had hung him there
to cure. We all remember what it’s like,
this driven season, this delirium
for something not yet given a name,
but the world turns us practical, tamesus to yearn for milder pleasures.
For Augustine, it was actual pears
that brought him out of the shadows
and over a wall, for Eve, the secret
inside what we now say was an apple.Others have given up safety for less,
and I wonder, catching an eight-point
buck outlined on the ridge amid spruce,
if it’s this moonstruck nature that renders
the ruminants beautiful, or if we stalkthem out of envy, not for the grace
of their gliding, but for the unadorned
instinct that draws them after dark
into trespass and the need to ruin
the sweetest thing they’ve ever known.