Almanac: Poems

By Austin Smith

The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetry

Almanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.

This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith's father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father's table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.

From Almanac:
THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUM
Austin Smith

Amongst the masterpieces of the small-town
Picassos and Van Goghs and photographs
of the rural poor and busts of dead Greeks
or the molds of busts donated by the Art
Institute of Chicago to this dying
town's little museum, there was a mummy,
a real mummy, laid out in a dim-lit
room by himself. I used to go
to the museum just to visit him, a pharaoh
who, expecting an afterlife
of beautiful virgins and infinite food
and all the riches and jewels
he'd enjoyed in earthly life,
must have wondered how the hell
he'd ended up in Freeport, Illinois.
And I used to go alone into that room
and stand beside his sarcophagus and say,
"My friend, I've asked myself the same thing."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781400848034

Austin Smith

Austin Smith is a college student at the University of Mount Union, in Ohio. He is majoring in secondary education with a goal of teaching high school history and was a member of the Purple Raider wrestling team. A graduate of Wellington High School located in Wellington, OH in 2010, Smith was heavily involved in sports, earning ten varsity letters in four different sports and voted by his classmates as the most athletic male. This is his first published book, and he hopes to continue with his writing. Austin lives in Wellington, Ohio, with his parents and his sister, Taylor.

Book preview

ALMANAC

PRINCETON SERIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

Paul Muldoon, series editor

For other titles in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets see page 82

ALMANAC

Poems

Austin Smith

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton & Oxford

Copyright © 2013 by Austin Smith

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art: © Andrew Wyeth, Spring, 1978, tempera on panel. Courtesy of the Brandywine River Museum, anonymous gift, 1987.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-15918-8

ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-15919-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938972

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Pro

Printed on acid-free paper ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, Daniel and Cheryl Smith and in memory of the farm they raised me on

Contents

The Silo / 5

Queen-Anne’s Lace / 7

Fort-Da / 8

Thistles / 10

The Night My Mother / 11

How a Calf Comes into the World / 13

Lightning / 15

Autumn’s Velocity / 16

The Brinkmeiers / 19

Aerial Photograph, Glasser Farm, 1972 / 20

Dean / 22

Coach Chance / 24

The Man Accused of Fucking Horses / 25

The Bait Shop / 26

Memoir of My Imaginary Sister / 27

Neon Apotheosis / 28

Bingo / 31

Stephenson County Fair in Wartime / 33

Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 / 34

Romeo and Juliet in the Tomb / 35

The Battlefield / 37

The Pit / 39

The Man Who Poisoned Robert Johnson / 40

Nazi Soldier with a Book in His Pants / 41

Sharpener of Knives / 43

Overlord / 45

The Hotel / 48

The Equation / 50

Resonance / 51

Postcards to Andrew Wyeth / 52

Recollection / 54

Letter to My Father Written in a Bar in Mitchell, South Dakota / 55

On a Greyhound Bus in America / 56

Mission / 57

The Scythe / 58

The Mummy in the Freeport Art Museum / 59

Sirens / 60

A Serious House on Serious Earth / 61

Poem for Les, Homeless / 63

Elegy for Missing Teeth / 65

Directions for How to Use Crest Whitening Strips / 66

The Trencher / 68

Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down / 71

The Key in the Stone / 73

Wake / 75

NOTES / 79

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / 81

Music is being played to the cows in the milking barn. Rules have been made and confirmed: only sacred music is to be played to the cows, not classical music. The music is to make the cows give more milk. The sacred music is to keep the brothers who work in the cow barn recollected. For sometime now sacred music has been played to the cows in the milking barn. They have not given more milk. The brothers have not been any more recollected than usual. I believe the cows will soon be hearing Beethoven. Then we shall have classical, perhaps worldly milk and the monastery will prosper. (Later: It was true. The hills resounded with Beethoven. The monastery has prospered. The brother mainly concerned with the music, however, departed.)

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

… some of you are thirty or thirty-one and hard beset and bound to someone in brotherhood, perhaps in art, and you may see that the brother-hood you know is of a kind really wider than you may have thought, binding others among the living and the dead.

Robert Fitzgerald, James Agee: A Memoir

ALMANAC

THE SILO

In the country there was nothing

to do some days but make ourselves

scared and nothing haunted us like the silo.

It was of gray concrete and girded round

with rusted cables, several of