Hawks on Wires

Hawks on Wires - Cover

Poems, 2005-2010

by Dave Smith

112 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / no illustrations

ebook available

Poetry

Hardcover / 9780807142301 / November 2011
$55.00
Paperback / 9780807142318 / November 2011
$18.95

Dave Smith’s sixteenth poetry collection chronicles the arc of almost sixty years living in the American South. From dusty sawmills to the ubiquitous Waffle House, Hawks on Wires stages both mortal and comic dramas that speak to the poet’s autumnal acceptance of himself and the South.

Poems of growing up engaged with the people of the coast and woodlands—boatmen, hunters, crabbers, sawyers, and tough-mouthed waitresses—celebrate the once strong but now tenuous threads of community.
 
Traveling through the latter twentieth century, Smith presents matters of family, sex, and race during a turbulent and historic era in southern history. Assassinations, withdrawal of religious prohibitions, violent cultural convulsions, and even the diminished meaning of the word “southern” shake the poet’s personal identity.
 
Smith uses the language of an ordinary man seeking meaning as the memory of events, carried over a lifetime, now begs for explanation. Despite the inevitable displacements and disappointments of identity, which remain mysterious, Smith finds optimism in life.

Dave Smith lives with his wife, Deloras, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, he has won two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, a Lyndhurst Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio, and the Virginia Poetry Prize. He retired from Louisiana State University as Boyd Professor of English, then from Johns Hopkins University as Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry.

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