And now this morning the story long distance:
you dropping incredibly dead
with Beth your true love by your side
high on some Norwegian mountain,
a blueberry meadow
where they don’t pick blueberries one by one,
drop them plink plank plunk down into a pail
the way Yankees do; oh no,
those Norwegians break off whole twig-ends,
slurp them deliciously through their mouths
and swallow great dusky clouds of berries.
This impressed you,
you, always a man easily thrilled. Dennis,
you are part of me still,
and I imagine how it was,
you sort of dancing, your arms flung wide,
gold fillings glinting in alpine sun
and crying out just before you died,
how can we be glad enough
for such abundance?
—from “Blueberry Hill,” for Dennis Jones
Patricia Clark Smith’s poems bring together a keen eye for family, friends, and lovers as well as a strong sense of ethnic and working class identity.
Her poetry reflects a number of topics, including raising two sons, family matters in western Massachusetts and coastal Maine, epitaphs and memoirs of friends, and her own life as a teacher and transplanted westerner.
Her humor and gentle toughness is reflected in her family poems, such as “Allouette,” and her meditation on class origins, “The Great Pat Smith Dream Poem.”
This is a bold, brave, and true book. A woman’s book; a mixed-blood’s book; a New England/New Mexico book. A poet’s book. A fine work from an exciting American poet.
— Paula Gunn Allen
Patricia Clark Smith’s ancestry is Irish-Micmac-French Canadian. She was raised in the projects in Northampton, Massachusetts after the end of the Second World War.
Later her family migrated to Portland, Maine, but she returned to Northampton to attend Smith College as a scholarship student. In her doctoral program at Yale University she studied under the well-known critic W. K. Wimsatt.
She has spent most of her adult life in Albuquerque, New Mexico teaching at the university there and working with Native populations and in the city schools.
