Prospect

Poems

Claire Sylvester Smith

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781682830550
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

Prospect comprises poems about vantage points, country and personhood, and the difficulty of understanding what is true. Through meticulously articulated explorations of knowledge, truth, language, and science's explanatory power, Prospect propels us toward grasping even the metaphysical. Presented in four parts—Prospect, Country, Proof, and Studies on Anatomy and Mourning—Prospect offers a vision of life scaled as small as a cell and as large as a country, as bordered and un-bordered as a human body, and heightened by the tensions of all that cannot be known.

Prospect

Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Prospect

Personal Statement

From a Great Height

As a Spleen

What Is a Window

An Economist’s Work

This Is What You Look Like

When a Man and a Woman Are Alone Together, the Third Person Present Is Satan

With Arms

Self-Portrait on the Occasion of Settling Down

Fidelity

Hotel Room Ode

Prospect

Poem From a Distance

Country

1776

Taxonomy of a Crash, Portland

Sourced

The News

Kingdom, Phylum

Out of Place

Country of One

My Aristocracy

My Aristocracy

My Aristocracy

Benevolent Protective Order of Elks

Retired Hunter Battle Cry

What the Horizon

Long Walk

Of Country

Proof

Confessions

Reanimation

Lady Time

Saturday Night Palsy

Lab

Made Red By

Material

Other Misunderstandings

Methods of Subtraction

Luxuriant

Why a Man Should Be Well-Dressed

Honeymoon Palsy

The Frank-Starling Curve of the Heart

Commendation

The Rule of Chambers

Catacombs

Studies in Anatomy and Mourning

Series Editor’s Foreword

Claire Sylvester Smith’s Prospect, winner of the 2018 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, takes up the necessary, yet slippery task of inquiry as the book’s fast-driving engine. In this collection, we must stake our understanding of what it means to be human on probability and potential; we find joy in the vulnerability of both inhabiting a body and lacking any certainties about the truth(s) filtered through the lived, embodied experience of personhood.

Throughout the collection, Smith’s speakers first describe, then probe a world that resists both pure sense and nonsense. These speakers refuse to solve the puzzles they often put forth, granting Prospect’s language a momentous and powerful instability. Poems like “Other Misunderstandings” tackle this instability overtly, as the speaker considers the ways she’s misunderstood signals and concepts in the “real world”:

. . . When somebody says

context I am crisp manila tabs. Meaning in this

way is unto its own cloaks and daggers

unfolding. Dirt as soil resting

where it does not now belong: how deep

shall I deep? I want to say. . . .

Here, past “misunderstandings” about the nature of various codified institutions like class (“I once thought being rich meant sitting / in a room with a piano”) and beauty (“I thought // being ugly meant spending all your money / on perfume”) reveal the chaos inherent in a world we foist meaning upon. As in other poems in Prospect, Smith here makes use of riddles, wordplay, and rhetorical questions to highlight the innate absurdity that foments when we seek certainty and find instability: “How long,” asks the speaker, “will the rust keep on rusting?” The rust stops rusting for the reader only when the reader can no longer...

Table of contents

• Prospect
• Prospect
• Personal Statement
• From a Great Height
• As a Spleen
• What Is a Window
• An Economist’s Work
• This Is What You Look Like
• When a Man and a Woman Are Alone Together, the Third Person Present Is Satan
• With Arms
• Self-Portrait on the Occasion of Settling Down
• Fidelity
• Hotel Room Ode
• Prospect
• Poem From a Distance
• Country
• 1776
• Taxonomy of a Crash, Portland
• Sourced
• The News
• Kingdom, Phylum
• Out of Place
• Country of One
• My Aristocracy
• My Aristocracy
• My Aristocracy
• Benevolent Protective Order of Elks
• Retired Hunter Battle Cry
• What the Horizon
• Long Walk
• Of Country
• Proof
• Confessions
• Reanimation
• Lady Time
• Saturday Night Palsy
• Lab
• Made Red By
• Material
• Other Misunderstandings
• Methods of Subtraction
• Luxuriant
• Why a Man Should Be Well-Dressed
• Honeymoon Palsy
• The Frank-Starling Curve of the Heart
• Commendation
• The Rule of Chambers
• Catacombs
• Studies in Anatomy and Mourning