A Book Review by Laura Stamps

THE WREN NOTEBOOK
by Rick Smith, 2000, 63 pages, paper, $10.00 (Lummox
Press, P.O. Box 5301, San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)

This is one of the most beautifully designed small press poetry books
I’ve seen. It is the first volume in the Little Red Book Master
Series, and is now in its second printing. The type is set in Tempus Sans ITC
and complemented by the joyful pen & ink illustrations of Judith Bever.
Additionally, little bird feet dangle at the end of each poem—yet
another visual treat for the reader. This book is truly a collector’s
delight.

Rick Smith is a poet, songwriter, blues harpist, and the son of painter
William A. Smith. He grew up in New York and Pennsylvania, and went on
to study with Anthony Hecht at Bard College. In 1965 he founded the
City Lights Band and has recorded with several of the great blues
musicians of our time. He and his wife Erika direct BACK IN THE
SADDLE, a residential treatment program for brain-damaged adults in Apple
Valley, California. Smith has published over 100 poems in small press
journals, and this is his second book.

This is a collection of 34 loosely structured poems, each titled by its
first line, casting the poet in the character of a wren. I cannot
thinkof a more charming role for a poet to play than one such as this—a
tiny, delicate bird floating on the wind from day to day, observing the
intricate details of nature and life from a higher perspective. And so
begins a journey with wrens around the world and their simple wisdom.

“If you watch from above,
some boundaries are different.
Frontiersand datelines
are inventions,
theory, not really
of this earth.
They are, simply,
not there, even
through these puzzle clouds
and turtles
in the sky.”

“Wren loses his place
in the wires.
You know how they smile
their wren smiles
when they dive.

To lose footing and smile,
that’s
the way it is
up in the air.”
“Marsh Wren has this habit:

I build, I build, I build and
I build but it is
all display.

I do not pause to organize
these constructions.”

“Something is going on
in the north of Spain
and winging over the Guggenheim,
I’m so incredibly brown
it would help to be color blind.
Something about spring:
it’s a trick
to nest in a building
made of titanium.”

“The wild Mexican wrens gather
out of Temecula and
if there is peach cobbler involved
they break into improvisation
that will turn some heads.
The highs pierce the sky.
The wrens break down the
gates of themselves until
they nearly howl.
Anything with a mouth can
do some damage
if the sky stays big enough.”

“If I can only find
St. Francis,
even a replica,
I’ll climb up into whose loving arms
and let them make me into wood
so I can sit safe and carved
in the bluest of the night.”