No poet makes me shiver like Tracy K. Smith, and her 2011 book “Life on Mars” makes me cry. The collection, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012, is a wild, kaleidoscopic elegy for her father, Floyd William Smith, a black man who grew up in pre-civil-rights Alabama and went on to work on the Hubble Telescope as an engineer. He was born in 1935 and died in 2008. Smith worked her grief into transcendence; the work is intimate and infinite—unbearably so. The final poem compresses a life into eight lines:
Another poem, “The Speed of Belief,” dedicated to her father, is a shifting, deepening cycle, revisiting the moments just after death; it makes me think of the literal translation of the title of the Bardo Thodol, more commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State.” Smith’s poem travels through stages that feel as discrete and expansive as galaxies. It ends:
I come back to “Life on Mars” when I need a reminder of the kind of courage and beauty that can only be found in uncertainty and sadness. I love her poem about David Bowie, “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?,” which went viral after his death. And I am utterly smitten with the collection’s first poem, “The Weather in Space,” which ends, “When the storm / Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing / After all we’re certain to lose, so alive— / Faces radiant with panic.” In the clip above, I discuss “Solstice,” which, Elizabeth Bishop-like, brings vastly different scales of loss into the frame, using rhyme to braid them together. The poem was first published in 2011, but six years later it has obtained a stunning new relevance.
