Women of America: Poems

by Charlie Smith

Book Overview

Women of America is an affecting meditation on the mysteries of what drives the heart by one of America's most distinguished poets. Charlie Smith draws the poems in this volume from the tussle and cry of love, in remembrance of love's journey from fantasy to fact and back again, and in anticipation of loving the way we were meant to.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393327353
• ISBN13: 9780393327359
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Draws connections between experience, memory, and intuition of all things female through the eyes of

Women Of America is a collection by award-winning poet and author Charlie Smith, reflecting on female aspects from children to call girls to mothers and lost love. Moody, at times tender, contemplative, and absorbed in mystery, Women Of America is a subtly musing anthology that draws connections between experience, memory, and intuition of all things female through the eyes of the male. Women of America: On the pale morning I left town / I was thinking about women, / and later, in the Rockies where work was scarce, / I thought of women all day / and pretended I was in Florida, for example, / at the little business opportunity my friend Calico / ran in the mall at Perry. By roads in the desert / and among the bean fields in California / I thought of women and / preserved this huge interior life for them / like an estate sheltered from creditors...

Lost highways

To read Charlie Smith's Women of America is to experience a journey, traveling familiar and unfamiliar roads, the external and the internal, with incisive glimpses into the heart of a man who uses words as his compass: "That is, darling, your turn will come. I'd walk out on myself if I could. I love the distant glow in the nighttime desert sky like a worn yellow spot in the dark everything might still slip through. ("Late Days: Outside Las Vegas") The images are extraordinary, the emotions stark, unflinching, revealing both the poignant and the painful, a self-examination without filters. He walks a worldly terrain, where place becomes incidental to the truth exposed, but where landscape serves as inspiration. And always the fading footsteps a love gone wrong or not yet known: I was thinking of a woman I loved, who wouldn't love me. I thought I would never get past this, and though it was obvious I would, that we all do, I began to love the pain that didn't want to go away, and held on to it. ("Compared to What") Love is held to the light for careful observation, but more the love one used to know or the love waiting, the act in constant transition as the author delves into his motivations and desires. There is no landscape that does not spark a memory of love or the wish for fulfillment. Both erotic and transcendent, these perfectly coupled phrases inspire introspection, a moment's passage into shared emotions, a soulful recognition: Dearest, they are tearing down the movie theaters- blackened areas in which we clutched each other, leaving marks. ("Talking to Whom") and... the solitude she entered like a phrase dispelling doubt, the solitude entrained and crowded now something- something- weeded out. ("Solitude") Throughout his wanderings, his mind returns again and again to the women who have shaped his heart, the incidental, the passionate, the forbidden, the lost and the mourned. Luan Gaines/ 2005.