Review: Dragging Anchor by Keri Marinda Smith

Reviewed by Thomas Moody

Dragging Anchor
Poems by Keri Marinda Smith
Hanging Loose Press, April 2018
$18.00, 72 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1934909553

“For Gainesville.” Keri Marinda Smith dedicates her first poetry collection to a place and not a person. It is a work deeply concerned with the importance of place, that where we are so often dictates who we are. Smith’s poems acknowledge that we are defined by the places we inhabit through both our absorption of them, and equally, our efforts to reject them. The self is not independent of its environment. Although we may move away from these places, these selves remain with us, in memory, experience, and wisdom. In the prose poem “Ocala,” the speaker recalls as a young girl going to the Ocala National Forest in central Florida, “horse-country,” with her now estranged father, to stay at a friend’s ranch. “We would ride our horses all day under the giant oak trees and through blonde fields and sometimes across lakes … Horse dust in my mouth. The smell of horses in everything. Even now if I smell horses, driving through the country with the windows down I have this homesick feeling for them.” In its shifting of place and time, both between and within poems, one of the questions Dragging Anchor asks is: where is home, exactly?

Smith was born in South Africa to American parents, who at the time were sailing the world on the open oceans. In the poem “How I Got Here,” the speaker addresses a childhood at sea, moving from port to port, having at the same time a home, and no place to call home: “growing up I was alone on the ocean / with myself up at night on autopilot / cruising south off the atlantic coast /  I knew something was out there.” Dragging anchor refers to the drifting of a ship with the currents despite it being anchored. This most often happens at night, when the crew is sleeping, and the vessel, without a guiding hand, wanders through the darkness. It is a poignant metaphor for our ability to drift away from people, places, selves, without intention, and often times, without noticing, until we are so far from where we once were it is difficult—impossible—to get back. In “A Love Song” the speaker recalls a relationship with an old friend from Gainesville who she tries to keep in contact with after she has moved to New York City:

I woke up about a year later but still in August
Ryan called to say you had killed yourself
I made the phone calls and sent out whatever words I could
another year later and I still like to read something you wrote called
a love song, anytime you can.

In the title poem, the speaker remembers waking up as a child in the middle of the night, her boat dragging anchor far at sea: “you’re in your berth and there’s the wood and the canvas but also the sense of time passing, too quickly.” Time may pass quickly, but it also remains with us forever. The poem ends with the speaker now living with her mother and stepfather in a small house on a river that is “so like a ship” that when she wakes in the middle of the night, she is instinctively afraid that the house is moving, drifting away from the place it should be “…and the rest of the house is sleeping and still and you know that it’s impossible for a whole house to drag anchor.” Even if “home” drifts and family moves, the house will not. It is something to return to, a reassurance and validation, a concrete monument of memory that much of her life has lacked.

Smith is not always solemn or deep in reverie. She is also a great celebrator of life, Whitmanic in her appreciation of her world, which she makes huge through her awareness of its sublime details. “In the City” opens with the lines “Today was a nice day for everyone, it seems / because everyone’s around to get dinner tonight.” Today becomes a litany of the day’s small victories: a trip uptown, “made it to 59th & / Lexington in 45 minutes, proud of that”; a free haircut “which turned out good, not too short”; the discovery of an unoccupied spot of shade in Washington Sq Park; the successful dinner arrangements made with a friend “it’s amazing what you get done, very cheaply, on a Wednesday.”

There is an intimacy to Smith’s writing that is wonderfully readable, a closeness without confession, a type of “personism” that is often bereft in some contemporary poetry that focuses on the abstract rather than the concrete, the emotion rather than the actions from which it is derived. Smith is the Frank O’Hara of New York dive bars and the Gainesville punk scene; there is an immediacy in Smith’s writing that is reminiscent of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, such as “The Day Lady Died” and “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean Paul,” where the smallest details—the precise time, an exact address—open up great worlds to explore. Smith’s poems are filled with suicides, drug use and heartbreak, but at no point does the writing become maudlin. Rather, these events are depicted as the experiences—routine but momentous, extraordinary but not unusual—of an American youth, growing up, trying to make sense of what is taking place around her, and inside her:

this was when we all lived on the same block
four houses connected by a yard
when we built fires in late September
and did acid in the afternoons while we drank
cheap white wine
before we all started
to secretly like Fleetwood Mac

Over the course of Dragging Anchor we witness the growth of the speaker as she drifts towards and away from people and places. The poems are not didactic, but when they do offer instruction, it is surprising, enlivening, and uncertain, even of itself, as in “Give Up for Spring”: “throw away boxes of photographs / maybe you’ll see those people again.” Epiphanies are also rare. Smith does not resort to platitudes and aphorisms. There is no mention of a “best-self,” no neatly packed resolutions or moral lessons. There is, however, a recognition of the past’s indivisibility from the present; and that to get to where, who, we would like to be, we have to travel through all places and selves, even the less desirable ones. But as the speaker of “The Kind of Person Who” declares, maybe one day we will become “the kind of person who / knows what bagel to order.” A small, but decisive victory.

Thomas Moody lives in New York where he is an Assistant Editor at Persea Books.