Books by Dave Smith
The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970--2000
by Dave Smith
In THE WICK OF NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1970 - 2000, Dave Smith's poetry reveals as never before its roots in the elegiac tradition that has marked a southern literature that has been so prominent in the twentieth century. Yet equally visible, now, is the ancestral shadow of the Anglo-Saxon poetry from religious questing and the inner voyaging of dreams to the runic parables of nature and its implacable force. Smith's style is a gritty, ever realistic presentation of human dilemmas in a world both familiar to us all and eerily strange, a world where the actions of individual character and contests over the principles of grace, courage, and passion still matter. Sailing Atlantic waters, exploring domestic relationships, or plumbing the sources of memory for a personal and a cultural identity, Smith's central concerns are those obligations we honor and those we fail. The thirty new poems in this collection show Smith turning from the work of an accomplished past to new formal practices that highlight a poetry intensely autumnal in its recognition of life's limits. Whether he writes of the weirdness of discount shopping malls, a pig's tail, or fractured romance, Smith finds that behind everything, as the image of memory's candle in the darkness reveals, is the singular reality of love. THE WICK OF MEMORY is Dave Smith's record of that vision.
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Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992–2004
by Dave Smith
A lyrical search for wisdom and meaning in the life of a man growing up in the New South of desegregating schools, rock-and-roll music, mobile populations, and volatile wars, Little Boats, Unsalvaged displays the profound historical sensibility that has long marked the poetry of Dave Smith. Smith exhibits here a mature perspective on his childhood in a racially violent society and on his troubled search for happiness, whether sexual, professional, or aesthetic. To that, he adds a chorus of elegies for poets central to his understanding of his native region―including Edwin Muir, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate―and a vision of poetry as the art that unites medieval and contemporary elements. Section by section, changes in subject, tempo, and even vocabulary offer at once a sense of unity and variety to the poems. Little Boats, Unsalvaged poses a polyphonic inquiry into the experiences and memories of the Vietnam-defined generation, an inquiry whose answers can only be tentative, fretted, hung in the contingencies of being just as the little boat of joy waits―not useless or lost, but abandoned and so beyond visible redemption.
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Looking Up: Poems, 2010–2022
by Dave Smith
Looking Up collects more than a decade of new poems by Dave Smith. These include reflections upon events, animals, and people who prove to have a salutary significance to this poet, now approaching his eightieth year. He ponders the substantial changes wrought by retirement, which brings no expectations, no obligations, no role beyond what one has left, which prompts the question, What will you do now? Both the question and its answers are the subject of Looking Up, as Smith gives us poems as acts of attention, raptures, comedies, sardonic narratives, vignettes of grief and joy whose testimony shows that love is surely our core reality.
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$20.95
Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry
by Dave Smith
In Hunting Men, poet Dave Smith reasserts the validity of poetry in our times. With eloquence, grace, and a searching intelligence, Smith illuminates both poems and poets. Believing that "great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place," he builds a compelling case for the importance of southern poets. Like the hunters who taught Smith as a young man patience, observation, and willingness to rely on his senses, he leads readers on an expedition through a specific poetic place with a sure sense of direction and destination.Beginning with a discussion of southern poetry that seeks to define the form and its value for a global readership, the first of the book's three sections also includes reflections on Edgar Allan Poe, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and James Dickey. In the second part, Smith focuses on contemporary poets Richard Hugo, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, and Larry Levis, among others. In the final chapters, he examines how he came to be a poet and reflects on the nature and practice of poetry.Smith describes himself as a poet born and raised in the South "but never entirely comfortable with the neighborhood or many of the public assumptions about southernness." By describing why southern poetry is important to him, he reveals why poetry matters to all of us as he asserts the moral weight of regional art. "My success, if it occurs, will be to send readers to the books of the poets where the world, as they knew it, waits and is full of the delights of the unglimpsed and known."
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Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005-2010
by Dave Smith
Dave Smith’s sixteenth poetry collection chronicles the arc of almost sixty years living in the American South. From dusty sawmills to the ubiquitous Waffle House, Hawks on Wires stages both mortal and comic dramas that speak to the poet’s autumnal acceptance of himself and the South.
Poems of growing up engaged with the people of the coast and woodlands―boatmen, hunters, crabbers, sawyers, and tough-mouthed waitresses―celebrate the once strong but now tenuous threads of community.
Traveling through the latter twentieth century, Smith presents matters of family, sex, and race during a turbulent and historic era in southern history. Assassinations, withdrawal of religious prohibitions, violent cultural convulsions, and even the diminished meaning of the word “southern” shake the poet’s personal identity.
Smith uses the language of an ordinary man seeking meaning as the memory of events, carried over a lifetime, now begs for explanation. Despite the inevitable displacements and disappointments of identity, which remain mysterious, Smith finds optimism in life.
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Onliness: A Novel
by Dave Smith
Tom Zucold's and Billy Luke Tomson's partnership in Bowie Garage is tested when Billy Luke falls in love with Promise Land
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Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs
This marvelous collection features stories from some of America’s finest and most respected writers about every outdoorsman’s favorite and most loyal hunting partner: his dog. For the first time, the stories of acclaimed writers such as Tom Brokaw, Howell Raines, Rick Bass, Sydney Lea, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, and Chris Camuto, come together in one collection. Hunters and non-hunters alike will recognize in these poignant tales the universal aspects of owning dogs: companionship, triumph, joy, forgiveness, and loss.
The hunter’s outdoor spirit meets the writer’s passion for detail in these honest, fresh pieces of storytelling. Here are the days spent on the trail, shotgun in hand with Fido on pointthe thrills and memories that fill the hearts of bird hunters. Here is the perfect gift for dog lovers, hunters, and bibliophiles of every makeup. This is a delightful, handsome volume that captures the wild spirit of dogs and those who love them.
Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for hunters and firearms enthusiasts. We publish books about shotguns, rifles, handguns, target shooting, gun collecting, self-defense, archery, ammunition, knives, gunsmithing, gun repair, and wilderness survival. We publish books on deer hunting, big game hunting, small game hunting, wing shooting, turkey hunting, deer stands, duck blinds, bow hunting, wing shooting, hunting dogs, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
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No copies available.
Afield: American Writers on Bird Dogs
This marvelous collection features stories from some of America’s finest and most respected writers about every outdoorsman’s favorite and most loyal hunting partner: his dog. For the first time, the stories of acclaimed writers such as Richard Ford, Tom Brokaw, Howell Raines, Rick Bass, Sydney Lea, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Phil Caputo, and Chris Camuto, come together in one collection. Hunters and non-hunters alike will recognize in these poignant tales the universal aspects of owning dogs: companionship, triumph, joy, forgiveness, and loss.
The hunter’s outdoor spirit meets the writer’s passion for detail in these honest, fresh pieces of storytelling. Here are the days spent on the trail, shotgun in hand with Fido on pointthe thrills and memories that fill the hearts of bird hunters. Here is the perfect gift for dog lovers, hunters, and bibliophiles of every makeup. This is a delightful, handsome volume that captures the wild spirit of dogs and those who love them.
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A Civil War Round Table Quiz Book
by Dave Smith
When Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, what state was admitted as a free state? President James Buchanan and one member of his cabinet were considered “doughfaces.” What does this term mean? The Battle of Honey Springs was unusual in that it did not take place in either a state or an organized territory. Where did it happen? Pit your knowledge of the War Between the States against your friends’ and family’s claims to expertise with A Civil War Round Table Quiz Book. The book features 117 different quizzes, the subjects ranging from the infamous Dred Scott case to the final surrender at Appomattox Court House. Each quiz has a theme, and the themes have been selected to cover myriad subjects and to lead readers into the lesser-known aspects of the war that they might not otherwise explore. The Hartford (Connecticut) Civil War Round Table even used these quizzes as a key component of their meetings. Civil War experts and general history fans alike will enjoy challenging their friends and rivals with the fun and interesting trivia found in A Civil War Round Table Quiz Book. The extensive knowledge that readers will learn from this book will amaze and befuddle even the most stalwart Civil War aficionado.
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$24.95
Blacklisted: The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists
by Dave Smith, Phil Chamberlain
Blacklisted tells the explosive story of the illegal strategies used by transnational construction companies to deny union activists work.
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