Life On Mars

El estilo de esta autora es muy original, te atrapa desde el primer instante con metáforas inteligentes y líneas llenas de reflexión. No creo que exista una persona que no lo disfrute.

Good value, pleased

I thought it was brilliant. She is a wonderful poet and I only look forward to reading more books from her. She is along side other great American poets such as Adrienne Rich. If one likes poetry, I would strongly recommend this book of poems.

"Life on Mars" is a collection of 33 poems touching on most aspects of 21st Century American hope and belief. Make no mistake about it: life on Mars is life on Earth, and readers will recognize the ironies (sometimes quite bitter) between our culture's surface appearances we so like to show others and the realities of deep scars and wounds we try to hide even from ourselves. The poem that gives the collection its title is a beautifully crafted work that discusses the "dark matter" existing between us that we don't (won't?) recognize and that might be responsible for wreaking havoc in our personal lives. It's a chilling indictment of us all that uses actual recent events in our country to make us hope and pray that it's dark matter causing our incest, intolerance, ignorance and destruction. An earlier generation would've said "The devil made me do it," but ours tries to lay the blame on natural phenomena. The poem packs a punch - deftly though, and artistically. I swear it must have taken Smith many revisions and months to get it right, choosing just the right image, the right words, the right inflections and line meter to achieve such success. The poem "Life on Mars" is followed by a shorter gem: "Solstice." Here, Smith addresses the killing of Canada geese at JFK airport, the killing of people, and the public's dwindling interest in the news. What's remarkable is Smith chose the format of a villanelle to tell the tale - a poetic form that uses rhyme, repetition and meter to create a mystical atmosphere. In this case, the villanelle greatly heightens a feeling of helplessness and loss, and we pray that the solstice of our culture has been reached and that light will soon begin to return. The poem that provides the biggest kick in the book, however, is the monumental elegy, "The Speed of Belief." It contains some great lines and images, and walks us through a daughter's coping with the loss of her father. I say "coping" and not "grieving," because the daughter tries to imagine her father's death as part of a continuum, not an ending, and the poem builds through seven magnificently crafted sections to a powerful, wonderful conclusion that will leave the reader satisfied and saying, "Yes! Yes!" And one striking image from the poem will stay with me for a very long time, her father standing in the heavens, and "Night kneels at your feet like a gypsy glistening with jewels." This poem alone is worth the price of the book! Great lines abound in this collection. For example, take this image from "The Good Life": a poor person " . . . walking to work on payday / like a woman journeying for water / from a village without a well." These are poems that unflinchingly capture the human condition today, but they do so with great beauty . . . and a touch of solace.

This is a beautiful, moving collection! First of all, when we think about Mars, Life on Mars being the title of this particular collection of poems, it is this faraway, disconnected planet, and really our concerns with Mars should be less pressing then the concerns with the planet right beneath our feet. Our concerns should be focused on Earth more intensely (I'm not discounting the importance of space travel, merely just suggesting that there's a lot to work on more close to home). Earth being a planet, which is complex and waiting to be discovered, it is even paradoxical to be surrounded by the earth and feel this open accessibility to it when we in fact don't know much about it at all, and yet with our fascination with somewhere far off parts of us are looking past it. Since there's a part of us that doesn't know to cope with the state of the world or even begin to remedy/fix its ugly parts that drive deeper than we can always admit. We can try we just sometimes become disillusioned from our good-hearted fights. I also think parts of us have become desensitized to the cosmos much like we do to the experience of watching David Bowie sing "Life on Mars?" After watching and being around something over and over again, with the off chance of the times we experience novelty and freshening of our eyes and perspective, its stripped of its meaning, and I think the song that this collection is based on functions as a parallel to how we see and experience life and the world around us, which can be troubling because after too long we begin to see through it. I also unfortunately had that same problem, to carry it over to space movies, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey (forgive me!) In her works, Tracy K. Smith also has a great deal of commentary about America and sense of identity and nationality, especially as living as an African-American woman in a household where discussion about race was repressed. Her family didn't know how to to talk about it, because it's another one of those fundamental things that we try to understand and make sense of for ourselves and for our children, but it comes, at times, to be too deeply threaded, hurtful, and difficult to broach. It's large and vast and problematic, just like space can sometimes be. So, in essence, Smith could also still feel unresolved alienation within herself and her identity even though she has come closer to knowing herself as she has gotten older. We focus on Mars to distract ourselves from other things, from other problems, like race, corruption, gender, power structures and struggles, xenophobia, and bigotry that directly impact us and our daily existences. So, this idea could relate to Smith as well because in living with the death of her father she’s trying to come to terms with a lot, and even reconfigure and reorient her life and who she’s supposed to be in a universe without him in it, but doesn’t fully know how because it isn’t clean or pretty or neat. Bowie poses Life on Mars as a question as if to ask us why do we do this? Why do we focus on Mars when there’s so much for us to focus on right here? And Smith poses it as a statement as if now to acknowledge that yes, we do, we do this, so what does this mean? And each of the poems becomes the fabric for her cosmos and her relationship to it and they also analyze why we feel motivated to focus on Mars, or really anything to distract us from our current realities, as a form of escapism when it is inevitable that everything will still be there waiting for us when we come back. A powerful group of poems!