A Brief Book Review of Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
It was toward the end of the first poem in Tracy K. Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Wade in the Water (2018), that I scrawled in the margin of the page, “to be alive is such a gift”. Such was the response that just one of her poems met in this reader.
The book is split into four distinct sections. The poems in these sections span more than a century in the timeline of American history, from a mosaic of the experiences of Reconstruction-era black Civil War veterans soliciting the Freedmen’s Bureau for their pensions, to the lives of black American women in the 21st century. It is truly a gift to be alive and also to see how Smith immerses the reader in each poem with beautiful imagery and novel turns of phrase. In “Garden of Eden”, about her life in Brooklyn during her thirties, we join her doing “bank-balance math and counting days” as the “known-sun [sets] on the dawning century”; in “A Man’s World” we see “the constellation of need” at the alluring and dangerous core of masculine sexuality; in “Ghazal” we learn that “History is a ship forever setting sail.” This is a long way of saying that Ms. Smith spits bars. She was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States in 2017 and is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor of humanities and creative writing at Princeton University. I look forward to reading her other works.