Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise

 

Dear lord king godly death maniac.
I’m just filling space with phatic utterance.
Surge for entry, dense roots strangled in clay.
Word by word weave Fat Tuesday’s brassy balance.
Liminal king of antiquity’s sunk mores.
Now winter braces hymnals with waste.
No gloves to love with or glow into.
Spin toward disaster—here we so
take it wildly. Listening beyond
where one’s self pretends plantation. Sensuous
cashmere or Thermore. Flannel sheets and wool
the kids wear threadbare. Dream vocal warden’s
venal agency making room for the dead.
A new wind enlivens uncertainty.

I’m intrigued by the latest full-length poetry title by Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). The Size of Paradise follows prior full-length collections Black Stone (effing press, 2007), Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014) and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as numerous chapbooks, including from Riot / September 2016, an Inside Out Journal (above/ground press, 2019), and at least two with Kirby’s knife|fork|book: Sons (2017) [see my review of such here] and Blur (2022) [see my review of such here]. The Size of Paradise is composed as a kind of book-length sonnet-scape or sonnet suite, one hundred pages of one hundred untitled poems. These are pieces composed through constraint, albeit one focused more on a gymnastic language than I’ve seen of his work prior, offering an array of poems that each sit self-contained, as a kind of repeated response to a particular prompt. “Promised bomb falls at each step and the dead / persist in long slumber,” he writes, half-way through the collection, “cohabitants / of earthly paradise. Circle the many / objects composing you, insistent / collection folding me in.” There’s a collage-echo to the sentences and phrases assembled here, and I’d be interested to hear how these poems began, almost expecting a response involving the daily motion of composing a poem with the only constraint being the sonnet, a consideration of duration and of writing itself.

I’m curious about the way Smith pushes at the boundaries of the sonnet form, stretching and extending outward in waves, the edges of these poems moving nearly as would lungs. As well, to move through these poems is to move across duration in an interesting way, through the very act of writing, and of reading. “To write is a / residue like beauty,” he writes, early on in the collection, “a deformity / one adapts.” A few pages further: “I can barely sense duration.”