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Ghost Arson
Ghost Arson is Barton Smock's first full-length collection of poetry.
62 pages, Paperback
Published November 21, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 8, 2024
I spoke with Barton Smock on the latest episode of The Collidescope Podcast. It's available wherever podcasts are streamed: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1849671/15...
You can also listen to it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF0iX...
***
It seems to me that a lot of modern poetry is not poetry but simply non-fiction with line breaks, so it’s refreshing to read modern poetry from an actual poet. As he first demonstrated with infant*cinema, Smock is conscious of language, of the power of a few words, or few words, and his mostly minimalist poems have the ability to evoke endless dreamscapes. The infinite from the finite, another paradox from paradoxical poems, poems that are like alternate or anti-paracosms. For example, here is one titled “Mooon.”
moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly?
my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail.
father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be
shot
by many hands.
By simply including an extra ‘o’ in the word ‘moon,’ elongating what Sir Richard Burton called the “corpse upon the road of night,” Smock conjures a wolf’s howl, a cow’s lament, creatures of childhood’s imagination and myth. And then we are given the juxtaposition, the amalgamation of vestigial past and fetal future and beyond, to the (moon) shot of doctors? adulators? murderers? An unborn heart metamorphosing from flame to fingernail, or existing as both simultaneously, like Schrödinger’s cat, until postnatal wave collapse. The phrase “father calls me antler” tells a story in and of itself, a mysterious nickname/endearment/joke/snide….
Considering Ghost Arson as a collection, there are obsessions or at least repetitions: owls, milk, ghosts, etc. The pinnacle obsession being god in all forms and personalities (“you picture god as a toddler studying a map” or “the airway of a god with a tail”), the word itself repeated nearly to the point of semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits James, who also suggested that the phenomenon could be employed to ameliorate phobias. Consciously or not, perhaps Smock is attempting to exorcise a theophobia. Conversely, the recurrence could be a mantra reverberating across poems.
Some of my favorite images include:
“step on the bones of a star”
“a snake made of milk”
“ear-shaped mirrors”
“spacesuits for stillborns”
“the owl with hands”
Surreal and soft-spoken, to enjoy Smock’s work one must learn to take pleasure in balancing on the fringe of the unknown and admiring the abyssal veil that stretches before you with scintillations that echo fallen stars. Read him and dream.
You can also listen to it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF0iX...
***
It seems to me that a lot of modern poetry is not poetry but simply non-fiction with line breaks, so it’s refreshing to read modern poetry from an actual poet. As he first demonstrated with infant*cinema, Smock is conscious of language, of the power of a few words, or few words, and his mostly minimalist poems have the ability to evoke endless dreamscapes. The infinite from the finite, another paradox from paradoxical poems, poems that are like alternate or anti-paracosms. For example, here is one titled “Mooon.”
moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly?
my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail.
father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be
shot
by many hands.
By simply including an extra ‘o’ in the word ‘moon,’ elongating what Sir Richard Burton called the “corpse upon the road of night,” Smock conjures a wolf’s howl, a cow’s lament, creatures of childhood’s imagination and myth. And then we are given the juxtaposition, the amalgamation of vestigial past and fetal future and beyond, to the (moon) shot of doctors? adulators? murderers? An unborn heart metamorphosing from flame to fingernail, or existing as both simultaneously, like Schrödinger’s cat, until postnatal wave collapse. The phrase “father calls me antler” tells a story in and of itself, a mysterious nickname/endearment/joke/snide….
Considering Ghost Arson as a collection, there are obsessions or at least repetitions: owls, milk, ghosts, etc. The pinnacle obsession being god in all forms and personalities (“you picture god as a toddler studying a map” or “the airway of a god with a tail”), the word itself repeated nearly to the point of semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits James, who also suggested that the phenomenon could be employed to ameliorate phobias. Consciously or not, perhaps Smock is attempting to exorcise a theophobia. Conversely, the recurrence could be a mantra reverberating across poems.
Some of my favorite images include:
“step on the bones of a star”
“a snake made of milk”
“ear-shaped mirrors”
“spacesuits for stillborns”
“the owl with hands”
Surreal and soft-spoken, to enjoy Smock’s work one must learn to take pleasure in balancing on the fringe of the unknown and admiring the abyssal veil that stretches before you with scintillations that echo fallen stars. Read him and dream.
December 4, 2021
“grief is the herd my sadness trails.
-
my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.”
— from “A Gun Goes off in a Dream I Don’t Have Anymore” (p. 6)
Astonishing work. Barton Smock is quietly writing some of the most striking poetry around. The poems in Ghost Arson really resonated with me, moved me in all sorts of big and small ways I can’t even begin to put into words.
(Barton probably could though...)
I’ve read through this slim volume five times now over the past few months and repeated exposure hasn’t diminished its power in the slightest. This is beautiful, surreal, haunting, often deeply melancholy work that deserves every poetry lover’s time.
Highest possible recommendation. Reading aloud strongly suggested.
-
my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.”
— from “A Gun Goes off in a Dream I Don’t Have Anymore” (p. 6)
Astonishing work. Barton Smock is quietly writing some of the most striking poetry around. The poems in Ghost Arson really resonated with me, moved me in all sorts of big and small ways I can’t even begin to put into words.
(Barton probably could though...)
I’ve read through this slim volume five times now over the past few months and repeated exposure hasn’t diminished its power in the slightest. This is beautiful, surreal, haunting, often deeply melancholy work that deserves every poetry lover’s time.
Highest possible recommendation. Reading aloud strongly suggested.
November 2, 2021
I am 100% a Barton Smock fanboy. Gather all of his books. Read all of his poems on his website. Sparse, surreal, dream-like, fluid. One of my favorite poets.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews