All Purpose Magical Tent

by Lytton Smith

A masterful debut collection by poet Lytton Smith, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 2009

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the book is filled with circuses and leather, it is both magical and serious. Here's a sample poem:

“The Wide Receiver Declares Himself Ready”

“Go long,” you say, “get open,” though you mean
Why don’t you tie your sorrows to your saddle-bow
and ride singing forth?—and I set off, gone beyond
the last bus-stop, its shelter idling, I continue
past the moon landing staged in a barn
the government has blacked-out and starred
with phosphor. I keep going, past the last whalers,
sea-town inns, verge-of-the-afterlife churches
clergied by sailors the ocean spewed back, I reach
the harbour where townsmen jettison the cargo
of tea leaves, I travel waters where the Armada lies
foundered from cannon-breach, I pass Chaucer’s company
returning, their contest forgotten as the inn approaches,
I go beyond the fifteen-foot walls of the Tower of London
to the battle at Hastings where the Normans feint flight
then charge then rout, and here, “Go long, get open,” means
“stand firm,” means “to the death,” and when I call “let fly”
you do, arrow or pigskin lost in the sun and I’m waiting
and waiting and you won’t believe the far I’ve gone.



Anyone who can write a poem called "The Wide Receiver Declares Himself Ready" and do it well deserves your attention. And there are several poems that are spectacular.

[Ellen Mcgrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally got my hands on Lytton Smith's first book, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, which I learned about when I met Lytton in Orono in 2008. Terrance Hayes had chosen it for the 2007 Nightboat Prize, saying in the Foreword that he loved it for its "crafty displacements" and that "some poets labor for years -- or record the music of aviaries and asylums -- in search of a syntax this particular, this peculiar." I agree. How much of it has to do with Smith's being British, and a student of Old English if I remember correctly what he told me in Maine he was studying at Columbia, I'm not familiar enough with either to say for sure, but the syntactical displacement and peculiarities are all through Lytton's lines. In "The Book of Encouragement & Consolation," a poem that takes on the voice of the eleventh century Eva of Wilton, who was sent by St. Goscelin of Bertin, the notes at the end of the book explain, "to become an anchoress in France"; the poem's title is that of a letter sent by the saint to Eva, whom at least one scholar claims was shut away by Goscelin because of his erotic feelings for her. Here is the poem in its entirety, and it is built like those crystals you can grow at home in the cold winter days before cable tv:

There have been men also, want perpetual
as hum and underbrush there must have,
though they call it hermitage. Entrance

to their closeting. Think of darkness a hand
reaching, the urge to speech prevented (tongue
composed, the parched throat no longer

a threshold)--all you own of touch is stone
and wall. If we were ourselves men, if we were
allowed the nursing of plants without, allowed

without...We are told our solitude is for promise,
our trappings a spur to wisdom. Men set down
what our solitude requires, that it removes

the body. Do you dare imagine the anchoress
laying a hand on her own flesh? Silence last
only to its next breaking.
If ascetic, we are imperfect.
If remembered, companied.

I've been hung up on that last line for a while, but overall, I'm mad about this poem. I make friends with it right off in the first stanza because of that fused bit of sentence in lines one and two, with "there must have" insisting itself into the first sentence before that sentence has had a chance to complete itself. The breaking up of the lines in this precise yet precarious way enhances that crystalline feeling about the poem, which seems right for the edged purity from which Eva is made to speak here.
There is a loose "circus tent" theme running through the book, but not overbearingly so. I'd say those poems involved with the theme are probably the least interesting to me. I also found the book's third and final section to be packed with the poems that most penetrated my nervous system, while the first two sections bantered about with my mind and busied my senses, at times pulling them out of their usual stands by the roots, as does the poem opening the second section, "The Anvil That Comes Before Your Civilisation"; it assumes a prehistoric perspective but manages to create the sense that the "we" who began at the ancient forges still, in some dimension, continue, that leaps and stages in human history are simply "pauses" before "we again to our smelt, // to the infirm anvil and what / weirds such forge and forage"(28). The last line here offers a good illustration of the kind of syntactic displacement Terrance refers to in the Foreword.

If the density and "proof" (I'm thinking alcohol here) of the poem thickens as the book progresses, if that's not just an illusion of my reading or something unique to my experience of the reading, maybe that's good...kind of like walking through a fun fair, taking much of it in, then entering a space where an increased intensity of concentration is both exacted and rewarded. "The Book," quoted above, is from this section, which opens with "[...]language as an unhomely dwelling place," a poem that takes its title from an essay by Jess Fenn and combines the compartmentaling stanza work of William Carlos Williams with the diction-as-picking-up-things-and-putting-them-in-place of Marianne Moore with the translocal vision of Wallace Stevens. I can't believe I just said that. Well, I need to remember not to do that again. But this book is a delight, in so many ways, and I hope to see more of Lytton's work in the years to come.

[Joshua Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dialogue found in each word. How to speak when every syllable is a mother's mother's forgiven monster's botching scavenger? Maybe it's better not to understand more than we need, maybe it's important to find those who walk this line quietly and respectfully, maybe it's best to stick with pictures.

Also, i carried this book strapped to my chest under the buckle clasping the shoulder straps of my pack. It would fall to the forest floor as i undid the clasp as i took a rest or went to get some water from a spring trail. I'd open it and read a thing or put it on my head and giggle at the thought of the book working as my ultralight tent. It's a happy copy and lived a walk and has retired to a shelf.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the themes in this collection. As I was reading, I thought this would make a great companion to "Water for Elephants" since it covers some of the same time periods and uses all sorts of amazing circus metaphors.