Analysis of Electrical Machines

Science & Math

Smith, R.T.

Technology

Pergamon Pr

The Hollow Log Lounge: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

University of Illinois Press

"This is no fairy tale. / It's all fantastic and bizarre and true. / It's my life, a raspy song, that sounds better if you sing along." The men and women who live and work near Opelika, Alabama, gather at the Hollow Log Lounge. There, under the watchful eye of the stuffed fox behind the bar, they unload their gripes and worries, tell their stories, argue, joke, commune, complain, and confess. In this collection of poems, R. T. Smith paints a vividly imagined portrait of the community in this small-town bar, capturing the chorus of the patrons' voices echoing off the knotted wood-paneled walls. Smith's stand-in, Sam Buckhannon, scribbles stories heard and overheard as tongues loosened by liquor spin out monologues in which southern idiom and vernacular seem perfectly at home within the constraints of measured verse.

With craggy Celtic metaphysics and perfect linguistic pitch, R. T. Smith evokes the landscape, culture, and history of Ireland and the New World through the eyes and ears of an outsider. Words matter to Smith, and the language of these poems is knotty and precise, blazing into moments of recognition with the elliptical testimony and spare light of everyday objects:
. . . adze and hammer, gate latch, cracked Baleek and a Claddagh brooch.
It is this muted voice of perfection, speaking from the simple lines of Shaker furniture, that chills the speaker of “New Lebanon” as he reflects upon the religious sect’s “hard bargain / with God, their promise / to be virtue’s monsters.”
Trespasser arcs with rigorous unity of vision from the secular to the heights of spiritual rapture, until the demarcation between world and spirit finally begins to blur. In a parable of the perfection in disorder, “Before the Breakup” juxtaposes the heartbreak of parting against the discovery of a bee embalmed in a jar of bramble jam. And “Passage to Kilronin,” a meditation on the drowning of a boy from one of the local trawlers, eloquently voices the notion of cosmic kinship.
The collection ends on an eerily pastoral note with the crepuscular, self-composed epitaph of St. Gristle, a holy madman:
I will be love’s gallows, all sap and marrow, mad lament of shadows and a mouthful of birds dying to sing.
Surely, this book suggests, between world and spirit there is, for those who can see, no demarcation at all. Trespasser is a dazzling, passionate collection, certain to delight and move any reader who has an ear for the music of language played by a virtuoso.

Trespasser: Poems (Studies in Industry and Society; 9)

LSU Press

Trespasser: Poems

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Brightwood: Poems

Written in the gothic tradition of James Dickey's Buckdancer's Choice, R.T. Smith's Brightwood contains 38 poems set in the American South. This intellectual and emotionally powerful collection is an interplay of southern music, religion and culture with nature.

Written in the gothic tradition of James Dickey’s Buckdancer’s Choice, Brightwood contains thirty-eight poems set in the American South. This intellectual and emotionally powerful collection is an interplay of southern music, religion, and culture with nature. Driven by memories of life in the rural, segregated South, the poems seek out beauty in an attempt to stave off loneliness, pain, and loss. The lyrics are moving, the language crackles, and the past haunts every verse.

In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts. A Confederate reenactor receives a message from the beyond to lay to rest the remains of Stonewall Jackson's horse. A docent at Washington and Lee University's Lee Chapel offers prim instruction on the facts and legends about "the General" with both reverence and irony. The young son of a lewd, alcoholic, self-dubbed evangelist acquires the wits -- and the will -- for survival by protecting the family's sunflower crops. A midget ukulele virtuoso is so surprised by his own eruption into violence that he can attribute it only to genetics. One of Jeff Davis's fellow cross-dressers; the killer of John Wilkes Booth; a Rebel deserter whose superior exacts his pound of flesh -- all these characters and more, through their twisted and torn vernaculars, seek understanding and revival in R. T. Smith's superb collection.

Uke Rivers Delivers: Stories (Yellow Shoe Fiction)

Contemporary

Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia

In Common Wealth Sarah Kennedy and R. T. Smith mine the deep vein of Virginia poetry to present a comprehensive collection of contemporary works that reflects the vibrant community of poets working today. Notable for its ethnic diversity, Common Wealth showcases the work of fifty-three poets―all of whom have a close connection to the Commonwealth―ranging from the virtually unknown to the well established, and representing all regions of the state.
Contributors:
Talvikki Ansel * Jennifer Atkinson * Molly Bendall * Kelly Cherry * Michael Chitwood * Rosanne Coggeshall * Stephen Cushman * Richard Dillard * Gregory Donovan * Rita Dove * Claudia Emerson * Forrest Gander * George Garrett * Margaret Gibson * Nikki Giovanni * John Haines * Cathryn Hankla * Henry Hart * David Huddle * T. R. Hummer * Julia Johnson * Sam Kashner * Sally Keith * Sarah Kennedy * Peter Klappert * Jeanne Larsen * Edward C. Lynskey * Heather Ross Miller * Elizabeth Seydel Morgan * Debra Nystrom * Gregory Orr * Eric Pankey * Jim Peterson * Hermine Pinson * Lucinda Roy * Steve Scafidi * Nancy Schoenberger * Tim Seibles * Dana Littlepage Smith * Dave Smith * R. T. Smith * Ron Smith * Katherine Soniat * Lisa Russ Spaar * Dan Stryk * Dabney Stuart * Eleanor Ross Taylor * Henry Taylor * Eric Trethewey * Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon * Reetika Vazirani * Ellen Bryant Voigt * Charles Wright 
Sarah Kennedy is Assistant Professor of English at Mary Baldwin College and the author of Double Exposure, Flow Blue, and From the Midland Plain. R. T. Smith is the editor of Shenandoah magazine at Washington and Lee University and the author of several books, including Messenger, Trespasser, and The Cardinal Heart.

Kennedy, Sarah

United States

University of Virginia Press

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