Tracy K. Smith sees in vivid color. Her moody, companionable poems are the closest one can get to the palette of painter Richard Diebenkorn in verse. Reading through her new book, Such Color, one trips over richness all across the spectrum: golds and blues, the scissoring red of a cigarette cherry at night. Sometimes the shades aren’t described, but emerge through a blurring of the senses, like when she writes of eating “cotton candy and roast corn.” Who can’t taste that buttery yellow, those fizzy pastels? In other moments, color arrives on the page with the solidity of compound nouns: soldiers with their faces painted “mud green.” Finally, most spectacularly, color can ride into a Smith poem on the levitational uplift of a metaphor. “The woman in a blouse / the color of daylight / Motions to her daughter not to slouch,” begins “Mangoes.” Should she wish to, one day, Smith will write fiction of a very high order. In the meantime, the night calls to her too. “After dark,” she writes, “stars glisten like ice.”
The interplay between what the poet can see and what she feels—between light and color and their shadows—has formed an exquisite, always-shifting tension in Smith’s work. Her poems are never, ever static. Moving from dark to light, grief into joy, these contrasts form the graceful swiveling, a book of new and selected poems spanning nearly 20 years. Open it at random and you will encounter a poet preternaturally adept at describing states of change—like love, and rapture—wherein we feel, as bodies, pleasantly operated on by a larger force: the way joy overcomes one like a blush, or a vibration, before one can name or state its source. You don’t read a Smith poem; you fall into it, surrendering, like an embrace, as in the best poems of Lucille Clifton.
