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    Life on Mars: Poems
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    Life on Mars: Poems
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    Life on Mars: Poems
    Ebook77 pages45 minutes

    Life on Mars: Poems

    By Tracy K. Smith

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize

    * Poet Laureate of the United States *
    * A     New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *
    * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year *

    New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

    You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
    To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
    Would your life say if it could talk?
    —from "No Fly Zone"


    With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 10, 2017
    ISBN9781555976590
    Author

    Tracy K. Smith

    Tracy K. Smith, guest editor, served as United States Poet Laureate from 2017–2019 and is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including, most recently, Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015. Educated at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford, she is the Roger S. Berlind ‘52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

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    Reviews for Life on Mars

    4/5

    158 ratings12 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Tracy K. Smith knows how to write poems of emotional intensity, candor, and charm. She proves that at multiple moments in this collection. So many of the poems are tightly crafted and concise while being abundantly clear, and often haunting. Like many collections of poetry, this book is divided into parts. The thematic elements and tone in each part of this book are very distinct, and that is perhaps to its detriment. Smith explores the concepts of literal/figurative space and outer space in interesting ways, but the overt homages to Kubrick and Bowie in the first part seem like a whole other collection when compared to social indictments of killers in part three or the meditation on a lover's hands in part four. I might try to look at each section as its own collection, but each one being not even chapbook length, it feels too underdeveloped. In looking at the collection as a whole, it seems too disjointed. Smith covers a great area perhaps unified by some notion of memory or space or loss, but this possible unity is not tangible enough to allow the collection the potential it has to be completely astounding.
    • 5/5
      In Waco, April means the Beall Poetry festival at Baylor University. In 1994, Mrs. Virginia B. Ball established the John A. and DeLouise McClelland Beall Endowed Fund to honor her parents and to encourage the writing and appreciation of poetry. Mrs. Ball was an English major who graduated from Baylor in 1940. Since 1995, the festival has celebrated some of the finest contemporary poets with readings, a panel discussion, and a lecture on contemporary poetry. Some of the invited participants include Donald Hall, Gary Snyder, Derek Walcott, Maxine Kumin, Galway Kinnell, Billy Collins, W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, Charles Wright, and Anthony Hecht.The 2013 invitees included Bobby C. Rogers, James Fenton, Les Murray, and Pulitzer Prize winner, Tracy K. Smith. Henry Hart delivered the Virginia Beall Ball Lecture.Tracy won the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, Life on Mars. She read several poems at her reading, so I had a tough time selecting my favorite. Even after a couple of reads, the power of description and the emotion in these poems shine through to this reader. “The Good Life” well-represents her talents:“When some people talk about money / They speak as if it were a mysterious lover / Who went out to buy milk and never / Came back, and it makes me nostalgic / For the years I lived on coffee and bread, / Hungry all the time, walking to work on Payday / Like a woman journeying for water / From a village without a well, then living / One or two nights like everyone else / On roast chicken and red wine.” (64)It must be obvious I like short poems, and here is another, titled “The Soul”:“The voice is clean. Has heft. Like Stones / Dropped in still water, or tossed / One after the other at a low wall. / Chipping away at what pushes back. Not always making a dent, but keeping at it. / And the silence around it is a door / Punched through with light. A garment / That attests to breasts, the privacy / Between thighs. This body is what we lean toward, / Tensing as it darts, dancing away. / But it’s the voice that enters us. Even / Saying nothing. Even saying nothing / Over and over absently to itself.” (23)A good poet, in my opinion, is one who consistently produces thought-provoking poems, with imagery that rakes my imagination over cooling coals of emotion, then leaves me with a smile, or maybe a frown, or even laughter at the clever connections to my life, loves, and experiences. Tracy K. Smith is one of those poets. 5 stars.--Jim, 4/17/13
    • 4/5
      Beautiful and thought-provoking poems that deal with space, death, birth, and David Bowie. It's clear to see why this collection won the Pulitzer!
    • 4/5
      Heart felt short collection of poetry an things like life, the cosmos and her relationship with and death of her father. These poems connected with me in a very intense emotional way.
    • 4/5
      So, let me be clear: I do not read a lot of poetry. In fact, since graduating college, probably only the poems that friends have posted on their threads here on LT. But I heard Smith speak and loved her as a person and I bought this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize.I am more of a traditionalist: I do not care for lines that extend into the next one, stopped by punctuation halfway in. Or stanzas that are sometimes three lines and then often two. Let's not even talk about rhyming. Clearly I am dated. Nor do I enjoy politics in my poetry. But there you are. This is what she does. In the end, my limits were tossed aside as Smith explored life, death, piracy, space, love, Bowie and her father (who worked on the Hubble Telescope).I didn't understand all of the poems, but many of them I found stunning, or really interesting, or both!This one is about the presence of her own child before conception: “When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me”...You must have watchedFor what felt like forever, wanting to beWhat we passed back and forth between us like fire.Wanting weight, desiring desire, dyingTo descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.From what dream of world did you wriggle free?What soared--and what grieved--when you aimed your willAt the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?
    • 4/5
      Current poetry leaves me cold, but I found these delightful, partly because of the SF theme, partly because she writes with good humor and grace. Got to find more by her.
    • 4/5
      Best for: People unsure about poetry but looking for a way in.In a nutshell: Collection of poems about life. Not just on mars.Line that sticks with me: “I didn’t want to believeWhat we believe in those rooms:That we are blessed, letting go,Letting someone, anyone,Drag open the drapes and heave usBack into our blinding, bring lives.”Why I chose it: There’s a poetry square on the summer reading BINGO I’m playing, and I figured, why not start with something from our nation’s Poet Laureate?Review: As I mentioned in the title, I don’t believe that I’ve read any poetry since high school. This slim collection seemed manageable, plus I loved the cover.Having read it, I’m sure that I’m missing some layers of meaning, but even with that acknowledgment, I can still say that I enjoyed this collection. I can see myself going back to it in the future, re-reading some of the poems.The poem “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected” was especially powerful, as Ms. Smith explores some particularly hate-filled murders (hopefully you know what I mean by that), including that of abortion provider George Tiller. In one section of it, she has the murdered writing postcards to their killers. It’s powerful.I’m not sure how much more poetry I’ll choose to read. In my city we have a poetry bookstore, so I might go in later this year and see if they have suggestions on more poems, and also on ways to really understand and read them.
    • 4/5
      This was the first book I bought in NYC, and the Book Riot Live conference, and it's the book I carted around the city in my purse, reading in coffee shops and over lunch. When I bought it, I thought the title was referencing Mars, the planet, rather than David Bowie, which was an unexpected resonance -- the high school friend I was staying with in Harlem is dating Iman's daughter. Bowie's step-daughter. There were a number of Bowie stories that weekend.

      Now, in between reading this book and writing the review, David Bowie has died. And so much of this book is about death and remembrance and what strings us all together that I need to read it again. All of it again.

      This is definitely one of those books of poetry that must be kept on the shelf. To be pulled down, again, in times of need. To read when missing a lost loved one. When feeling connected to the whole universe. When needing to feel connected to the whole universe. When darkness baffles us. When it is all too clear.
    • 4/5
      Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry from Tracy K. Smith. Split into four parts this beautiful and haunting collection will have a lasting impression on readers. One of my favorite passages is even about a library: "Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.All the tall shelves in the big open room, And the pencilsIn a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.The books have lived here all along, belonging For week at a time to one or another in the brief sequenceOf family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies."
    • 2/5
      Clever imagery at times but it didn’t really connect with anything on an emotional level so it just left me cold.
    • 4/5
      Smith's poetry is so approachable yet deep that it is easy to see why she was a poet laureate.
    • 4/5
      This was my first Tracy K. Smith’s book that I’ve ever read but her poems are gentle, strong, and pretty at the same time.