Review: Abraham Smith’s Ashagalomancy
Abraham Smith
Ashagalomancy
Action Books
2015
115 pages
Paperback, $15.95
Abraham Smith seems to speak the English language. He uses English words. The title of his new book of poems, Ashagalomnacy, which is the diving of bones, perhaps provides a clue to the use, because the words themselves seem to be these very bones. That is, there is sense coming through them, but often it comes by the side, at one’s knees, or a tap on the shoulder, only to find no one’s there. The effect of the writing is nearly pointillist, in a way, which is not to summon up hazy days at a lake where bourgeois dreams are made. But it has a cumulative, tidal quality. The worlds of Smith’s poetry offer up a delightfully twisted mix of rural oasis and forays into the modern, or whatever period this is. The lines can move off into plucky rushes of assonance and alliteration, with a kind of chipping rhythm. There is moon-sloshed hollerin’ too. He’s a twangy sage. A bit like Bob Dylan in his Bringin It All Back Home phase. Surreal, peopled, casually spiritual, bird herding or hearing, with a lot of lightly touched upon colorful events that one sort of gets the gist of. For instance: “had to take care not to call the world beautiful / ether word head wounds sometimes made / the world what he read about loss is yum / a shaving cream cake / that plain bean vine knife fizzing thru.” The scenes within the poems are natural packages of rueful crooning, though never sentimental, somewhat Steinbeckian, but no Monterey, Salinas, here, more Midwesternally echoed and pastured. Structurally, the poems begin in the same refrain throughout the book: “In the old days”—which is seemingly both sincere and a feint. (One hears an old codger on a condemned porch holding forth in its lines.) Smith, though, is not an old man, but a youngin’, as he might say. So, the effect of a younger person taking on the backward-looking stance is worth a smile. The tales told are whacky, charming, and restless, often sort of giving up on themselves, and just starting again in a new direction for no reason or worry. There’s an ease in his work because of this; it is wayward and yet present, halting and then flowing out into space. There’s no one alive writing like Smith, and maybe only Frank Stanford was the closest literary kin. To read his poetry is a resonant adventure, a green dream, but to hear it in person, with his stamping foot and bobbing possessed head, is an even greater glory. Glory be.