The Intentions of Thunder
Patricia Smith, published by Bloodaxe Books
The difficulty of reviewing Patricia Smith’s The Intentions of Thunder, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is one of scale. New and selected poems bring together more than three decades of work in which she binds her own private catastrophes with the atrocities she is familiar with and committed to documenting: Juneteenth, the Tulsa Race Massacre, 9/11, Obama’s presidential campaign, Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Smith’s gift lies illuminating the splinters such events cause in the self and the psyche, acknowledging a more provocative form of commemorative language.
Smith begins her 1991 collection Life According to Motown with Black girlhood as a condition of constant performance: to be “wearing a lot of white.” The phrase mirrors the expectations of Black girls to exceed expectations that are otherwise disregarded for societally-accepted white girls. White suggests a racial demand through which Smith offers her own body into dialogue straight into her first body of work, wearing this costume of purity forced on a child already “smelling blood in breakfast.” When the poem reaches “finally having a man reach out for you / then caving in around his fingers,” Smith reflects how a violation like this feel like a sickening alteration of the body’s shape. Later, “my lips have grown numb” mirrors the exhaustion of a mouth forced into too many uses, and Smith excavates the afterlife of lecherous sensations on the gendered and racialised body, asking what remains when language, like the body, has survived through much turmoil.
Smith lets sound lead in her lines, and this gives these poems a carnal pressure: “Cursed futures crammed into / cotton pouches with pinches of bitterroot”. This resonates with compression, imagining Black futures as stuffed, bound to their histories as enslaved, and made portable as charms or burdens. In “the horrid parts / of meat stewed sweet and possible,” Black survival becomes gustatory and confronts how Black history is bastardised by a white audience to be as appetising as possible through America’s erasures of the horrors it enacted.
Smith positions herself as a poet with almost no power to bring real-world change: “I am a huge excuse, a resolution / machine, a shackled poet with my past chained to my hands.” After September 11, the craft itself falters: “For poets, these are impossible days.” She has “every letter” available, yet to “conjure fly” is so often to “fall.” The confession is daring because Smith is technically dazzling – her poems know exactly what language can do, and are haunted by everything it cannot. In ‘Pandemics,’ “The virus is a flood of mercy’s absence,” while the “pile of bodies” becomes “gossamer.” This catches the obscenity of bodies made weightless by governmental neglect, and Smith brings into seeing how the dead turned insubstantial in the public imagination.
Against that erasure, Smith places the stubborn particulars of love. In ‘The First Time Trying to Say Where My Son Was’, her son’s “unlaced Adidas flopping” preserves him in awkward motion, unclaimed by doom. “Where in your life did your rhythm get lost?” she asks, acknowledging she cannot save him, before admitting that “giving you up to this world / is a choice I have yet to make.” Smith says “women only live in prayers.” Her work evidences that they also live in syntax, syncopation, rage, the playfulness of lines, and memory. Smith sings to us as a tidal force of wisdom in these poems, and by illuminating as fully as possible the racial prejudices in America, invites the reader to bear witness and to enact the real-life change she cannot make alone.
Reviewed by Ali Choudhary
