Life on Mars: Poems

"Life on Mars" is a collection of 33 poems touching on most aspects of 21st Century American hope and belief. Make no mistake about it: life on Mars is life on Earth, and readers will recognize the ironies (sometimes quite bitter) between our culture's surface appearances we so like to show others and the realities of deep scars and wounds we try to hide even from ourselves. The poem that gives the collection its title is a beautifully crafted work that discusses the "dark matter" existing between us that we don't (won't?) recognize and that might be responsible for wreaking havoc in our personal lives. It's a chilling indictment of us all that uses actual recent events in our country to make us hope and pray that it's dark matter causing our incest, intolerance, ignorance and destruction. An earlier generation would've said "The devil made me do it," but ours tries to lay the blame on natural phenomena. The poem packs a punch - deftly though, and artistically. I swear it must have taken Smith many revisions and months to get it right, choosing just the right image, the right words, the right inflections and line meter to achieve such success.

The poem "Life on Mars" is followed by a shorter gem: "Solstice." Here, Smith addresses the killing of Canada geese at JFK airport, the killing of people, and the public's dwindling interest in the news. What's remarkable is Smith chose the format of a villanelle to tell the tale - a poetic form that uses rhyme, repetition and meter to create a mystical atmosphere. In this case, the villanelle greatly heightens a feeling of helplessness and loss, and we pray that the solstice of our culture has been reached and that light will soon begin to return.

The poem that provides the biggest kick in the book, however, is the monumental elegy, "The Speed of Belief." It contains some great lines and images, and walks us through a daughter's coping with the loss of her father. I say "coping" and not "grieving," because the daughter tries to imagine her father's death as part of a continuum, not an ending, and the poem builds through seven magnificently crafted sections to a powerful, wonderful conclusion that will leave the reader satisfied and saying, "Yes! Yes!" And one striking image from the poem will stay with me for a very long time, her father standing in the heavens, and "Night kneels at your feet like a gypsy glistening with jewels." This poem alone is worth the price of the book!

Great lines abound in this collection. For example, take this image from "The Good Life": a poor person " . . . walking to work on payday / like a woman journeying for water / from a village without a well."

These are poems that unflinchingly capture the human condition today, but they do so with great beauty . . . and a touch of solace.

I'm sure there are hundreds of intellectual reasons this won the Pulitzer, and Smith is obviously very smart and good at what she does. But, to me, this stuff seems quite convoluted and forced. It's written for other would-be poets and literati. Where's the guts? It's all just heady, well-researched, allusions to other poets, rock songs, and armchair science theory, with a dash of "hip" space movie connections. Whatever emotion is meant to be in these lines gets mired in poetic self-consciousness. I'll take Bowie's song (which gives this collection it's title) over this any day.

I have a tendency of buying things on my wishlist when I'm intoxicated, and this just so happened to be one of those. I'm extremely pleased with this purchase. Tracy K. Smith's poems are grand, sometimes grand enough to give me chills. This is definitely a poetic endeavor that has landed among the stars.

I am happy that Ms Smith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Unfortunately I do not know what she is writing about with the exception of the portion imagined as murdered chidren speaking. This was a book assigned for my book club, and it was not understood nor liked by anyone in the club. If you understand and like new poetry you might like it. Try borrowing a copy before you purchase it.

I read about this book in an issue of Nature, since I am a fan of both poetry and science related literature I decided to investigate! Tracy K. Smith does a nice job of offering a very human perspective on grand topics. The diction in this sense provides the reader with the most essential concepts of meaning and leaves us to wonder about the "Who" and "what." Time disappears as eternal questions of existence move the reader to wax ontologically. There is a balance of personal feelings and explorations of the majestic. It's reassuring to know that, in the tradition of prerogative, Ms. Smith has the jurisdiction to make creative musings on this scale. These poem's titles inspire the reader to dive into the freeness of these forms and break the code of "Savior Machine", identify with "At Some Point, They'll Want to Know What It's Like" and nod affirmatively with "Do You Wonder, Sometimes?"

The image on the cover does a lot for point of view, and leaves the reader with the question "Is it possible to sympathize with an imaginary significance, and in the same breath admire the "The Largeness We Can't See"?

This is the second book of poetry by Tracy Smith that I've read. The first was "Wade in the Water." Of the two, "Life on Mars" is a little less accessible. On the whole, I had to struggle to glean meaning from her poems. To be sure, some of her poems (e.g., "Song," "Us & Co," and "Solstice") are straightforward. One - "They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected" - is extremely moving. But I found most of her poems in this collection to be borderline head-scratchers. Her command of language and metaphor is excellent but I personally found many of the poems tough going. Recommended with reservations. (For a bit too much abstruseness.)

verbose fluff. stale. linguist, not a poet. those were my visceral reactions. since they were taking away from the experience, i opened my mind and wound up reading at a level where i felt it necessary to dissect it apart word for word as if an assignment or a microscopic examination. i was determined. the title is "life on mars", after all, dammit. i wound up highlighting a bunch of words i could expand my vocabulary with. i backed away and thought it was both sad and funny. unimportant. mars isn't even on the cover so i guess i had it coming or whatever.
i can feel her poetry suffering with frustration. after initially rolling my eyes i hoped she'd prove me wrong, that this wasn't going to be the cavalier tone that's so fashionable to like these days. it's trite. i'm tired of it.

i really appreciate all the early-bowie references, and kosmos having something to do with her story- although it hardly comes across as a theme, other than one in the titling, or a reference thrown around here and there throughout a pretentious, sort of narcissistic account. i couldn't ACCESS it is why i call it narcissistic. it isn't universal.
perhaps the educations of the author and i differ (re: her bio on the back cover). i do see a poet in her work, somewhere. lost and dying to be found. if the author is truly concerned about her voice, she needs to back away from the prestigious (e.g: her bio on the back cover) and consider finding that voice again.

The first third of this book is quite good, showing Ms. Smith as a poet with an original voice and vision. I thought the latter poems in the collection not so inventive. This could just be me, so if your a Tracy K. Smith champion, please ignore my remarks. I read a lot of contemporary poetry and much of the last half of this book seemed weaker when compared to the first grouping of poems. Still, she's a poet worth watching.

This is a beautiful, moving collection! First of all, when we think about Mars, Life on Mars being the title of this particular collection of poems, it is this faraway, disconnected planet, and really our concerns with Mars should be less pressing then the concerns with the planet right beneath our feet. Our concerns should be focused on Earth more intensely (I'm not discounting the importance of space travel, merely just suggesting that there's a lot to work on more close to home).

Earth being a planet, which is complex and waiting to be discovered, it is even paradoxical to be surrounded by the earth and feel this open accessibility to it when we in fact don't know much about it at all, and yet with our fascination with somewhere far off parts of us are looking past it. Since there's a part of us that doesn't know to cope with the state of the world or even begin to remedy/fix its ugly parts that drive deeper than we can always admit. We can try we just sometimes become disillusioned from our good-hearted fights.

I also think parts of us have become desensitized to the cosmos much like we do to the experience of watching David Bowie sing "Life on Mars?" After watching and being around something over and over again, with the off chance of the times we experience novelty and freshening of our eyes and perspective, its stripped of its meaning, and I think the song that this collection is based on functions as a parallel to how we see and experience life and the world around us, which can be troubling because after too long we begin to see through it. I also unfortunately had that same problem, to carry it over to space movies, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey (forgive me!)

In her works, Tracy K. Smith also has a great deal of commentary about America and sense of identity and nationality, especially as living as an African-American woman in a household where discussion about race was repressed. Her family didn't know how to to talk about it, because it's another one of those fundamental things that we try to understand and make sense of for ourselves and for our children, but it comes, at times, to be too deeply threaded, hurtful, and difficult to broach. It's large and vast and problematic, just like space can sometimes be.

So, in essence, Smith could also still feel unresolved alienation within herself and her identity even though she has come closer to knowing herself as she has gotten older. We focus on Mars to distract ourselves from other things, from other problems, like race, corruption, gender, power structures and struggles, xenophobia, and bigotry that directly impact us and our daily existences.

So, this idea could relate to Smith as well because in living with the death of her father she’s trying to come to terms with a lot, and even reconfigure and reorient her life and who she’s supposed to be in a universe without him in it, but doesn’t fully know how because it isn’t clean or pretty or neat. Bowie poses Life on Mars as a question as if to ask us why do we do this? Why do we focus on Mars when there’s so much for us to focus on right here?

And Smith poses it as a statement as if now to acknowledge that yes, we do, we do this, so what does this mean? And each of the poems becomes the fabric for her cosmos and her relationship to it and they also analyze why we feel motivated to focus on Mars, or really anything to distract us from our current realities, as a form of escapism when it is inevitable that everything will still be there waiting for us when we come back. A powerful group of poems!

There is a sci-fi tilt to Tracy K. Smith’s book of poetry, Life on Mars; her father was an optical engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. He'd "read Larry Niven at home and drink scotch on the rocks,/ His eyes exhausted and pink." A good part of the book reflects her reactions to his death in 2008. She also takes a celestial-eye view of our foibles ("I spent two years not looking/Into the mirror at his office") horrors (the "father in the news who kept his daughter/ Locked in a cell for decades") and irrationalities ("I didn't want to believe/ What we believe in those rooms").

I hoped to find the remarkable title poem, Life On Mars, somewhere online, but no luck. It starts like this:

"Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people
When what holds them together isn't exactly love, and I think
That sounds right - how strong the pull can be, as if something
That knows better won't let you drift apart so easily, and how
Small and heavy you feel, stuck there spinning in place."

Life can treat us roughly and horribly.

"I knew which direction to go
From the stench of what still burned.
It was funny to see my house
Like that - as if the roof
Had been lifted up and carried off
By someone playing at dolls.

***

Tina says we do it to one another, every day,
Knowing and not knowing. When it is love,
What happens feels like dumb luck. When it's not,
We're riddled with bullets, shot through like ducks."

Is it all due to dark matter? Or something else? It's well worth your tracking down that title poem to find out what she says.

This excellent one, beautifully titled, "My God, It's Full of Stars", can be found online. [...] Here's part of it:

"Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke."

The title of the book comes from the David Bowie song, and his Ziggy Stardust persona pops up in the poems. So does the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and other cultural artifacts. This is a poetry book that's easy to enjoy, while giving the reader lots to ponder. I love this question she raises at the end of "No-Fly Zone"

"You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?"