Erin Elizabeth Smith’s collection of poems measures desire in terms of distance and studies its varied topography in metaphors of landscapes, whether of various countries or the body.  This theme—a willingness to tread the distances desire brings us—threads each poem to another and each of the four sections together.  Such a large task requires a similarly large scope, and Smith peruses the modern myths of the American South, Midwest, and East Coast and agrarian Russia as well as the ancient legends of Ireland.
 
Smith’s study of the self takes root in the Deep South—“We have to start somewhere,” she says in “The Mulberry Trees.”  “Somewhere” means Florida, where the speaker understands her longing for an estranged father as “blue crabs in a trap,/ their claws opening like the map that unfolds/ and sets them free.”  Meditating on the breaks and surges within the speaker’s later relationships, Smith deploys the metaphor of the hurricane in “Hugo” to understand our impulses and responses to failed intimacy (“a hurricane is different./ …It’s the evacuation we all need/ an excuse for.  It’s putting a city to sleep./ It’s mercy.”).  By mapping the internal onto the external, Smith shows us how we can better study and then understand the self-in-turmoil.

Distance is also a central motif in the retellings of Irish myths, as Smith calls up from the void the voices of legendary women in “Becfola,” “Sin (Storm): A Pantomime,” and “Macha Speaks of her Children.”  When she allows these women to speak for the first time, all of their voices are rich with difference: Macha curses, Sin chants, and Becfola becomes bard to her own tale.  The mythological women of the first section of Smith’s collection allow the everyday speaker of later sections to reach similarly epic dimensions in the final poem of the book.  By the time she has sounded the depths of her yearnings, she has morphed into “this luminous nomad,/ … this woman you see,/ you know.”   

Just as Smith spans time and space to study human longing, she shows flexibility in her use of meter and rhyme.  In the exemplary poem “The Root Vegetables,” motion and paradox are at play as the speaker searches for direction while meditating on Russia’s vegetable gardens—“Would it be so bad/ to slow to the quick of things?” the speaker asks herself.  Smith’s decision to use terza rima as the skeleton for her meditation is an appropriate one, since it allows for a controlled loosening and then lacing of thoughts.  The intricate movement of the speaker’s thoughts follows the movement of the rhyme scheme, and upon the poem’s conclusion the speaker is able to come to a resolution, to “feel the sifting in this place,” identify with it, and follow the example of release as shown by the gardens’ potatoes “that chew/ the earth, that do not fight, rather let go/ before winter claims them.”

Whether she grounds her meditations in the image of the vegetable or the hurricane-tossed town, Smith’s poems enable readers to follow desire’s journey, prod the tenderness of failed hopes and undergo the exquisite pains of regeneration.