A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life by Jared Smith
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“A Sphere Enclosed in Fires and Life”
Poetry
NYQ Books, 2023
$18.00, 108 pages
ISBN: 978-1630450991

In poem after poem, including the title poem, we find Jared Smith contemplating the world from his back porch, sometimes with a drink in hand. It’s an apt image, for Smith is like a wise man of old pondering existence in solitude. “The Launching of Satellite Cities” begins:

What are these things we look up to?
Again, I’m sitting on my porch
listening to the crickets going extinct
beneath the stars.

The heavens, of course, the constellations. Musing on the manmade satellites up in the sky, with the stars, he asks himself what we should label them. “That one there, perhaps, The Money Changer, / That one there Abyss or Pocket Change.” So much for Gemini and Cassiopeia, eh?  Smith’s cynicism about corporate greed runs throughout this thoughtful collection. But it may be the next logical extension of naming rights for sports stadiums, after all.

So often there’s a kind of lament in his tone. In “A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life” (and what more evocative image of the earth than that?), he writes:

This is a cold, distant night
within a cauldron we cannot name,
and the mountains of Indian Peaks
which rise just off my back-porch
vibrate with a deep thrumming vibration
echoing the pace of the human heart.

Originally from New York, Smith, who now lives in Maryland, spent many years in Colorado, where many of these poems are set. It’s where that back porch is located. Smith repeats the phrase, “a cold distant night” throughout this poem, providing a sense of foreboding (“it is encased in fires and tides that pulse / with the hearts of children and of deer and wolves”)

This old man is dangerous. When
the evening news is on he is on
the back deck of his home watching 
the evening sun paint colors of Jupiter 
in circular clouds above the cities,
and he knows many who have died 
in the offices of our aristocracy…

He is lamenting the boys who died in Vietnam, mourning the deaths of kids fresh out of high school, in Afghanistan. Yes, he is dangerous. “He talks to wolves / in the land of the dead.” Again, the wolves, a symbol of the savagery, the desolation, lurking at the heart of civilization.

Smith’s contempt for bloodless bureaucracies and corporations is nowhere more on display than in “Poetry Is More Than Words on Doilies, Mrs. Nea.” It takes the reader a minute to get the reference – National Endowment for the Arts, or is it National Education Association? It’s the faceless government committee that allocates or withholds funds. “Poetry is rather the science and song of human feeling,” he tells Mrs. Nea , “the song, the flesh, the blood that lies on our streets.” 

Smith goes on to tongue-lash Mr. Cia for the institutional crypt that is “but a lonely echo of what bureaucracy is, / and that lonely echo is filled with our destruction.”

Memory and dream are potent forces in Jared Smith’s poetry. The memory of the Kent State student massacre remains a vivid one half a century later. The very first poem in the collection, “Bone Soup,” is written to a dead friend who was an English professor at Kent State, who “cradled the shattered head of your student,” scarred forever, grieving for all those kids “butchered / in cataclysmic capitalistic testosterone and greed.” 

Later, in “And it’s August,” we find the poet again on his back porch with his friend Vic. “I marched against the war after Kent State 50 years ago,” he recalls, and his idealism At the heart of A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life is the long, fourteen-part poem, “A Season of Significance.” Again, in sections like “There Is a Song in all Poetry” and “It Is Not a Soft Song” Smith extols the healing power of poetry, as he does to Mrs. Nea.  

The  song is never going to be a soft song
until the dead are buried and ghosts haunt our dreams.
This is the way it has always been.
The dying do not sing in churches.
Their songs must overcome those 
who march with rifles and AK-47s.
Their songs must overcome starvation,
must overcome the overlords who cage them….

In this poem, Smith alludes to the pandemic and to the shutdown that followed, to George Floyd and social injustice based on skin color, to the dead of the forever wars in the Middle East.

Without shying away from the horrors and griefs of our existence, yet he lauds the redemptive powers of poetry and song.  This attitude is evident throughout the book. Take the poem titled “Toward the End of Everything.” Can you think of a bleaker title? It’s a poem to the daughter of a friend who has recently died, her grief still raw even as she thanks him for the dinner, he and his wife have brought the grieving family. “I loved him and will do anything to help you

I murmur in my deep soul-searching voice 
because I loved him and we drank together 
often and fought against the tyranny of hate
and didn’t trust the media but trusted love…

Amen. Jared Smith’s A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life is a lyrical evocation of the challenges we face – the hand we’ve been dealt – and how to respond.