Jack Gilbert insists that “there will be music despite everything,” and Smith has taken this sentiment to heart, transposing “beauty” for “music,” and does so not only with rhetoric — and I use this term loosely — but with abundant passion, however tonally variegated it may be, and the power of her poetic facilities, and this is why she should be read. Not by sheer talent alone, but with the skill of a technician unabashed to say “… I / have only promised to attempt. I have attempted. Let’s move on.”

When finally we do move on to the final section, any reader might assume the transformative Smith we found in the preceding section, “Beauty,” has been replaced with the regressive one we believe we’ll discover in “Devastation.” How will grief be recapitulated, here? — one might wonder. Though when we turn to the first poem of the section, “Fuck You,” there is a deeply embedded fear in the pit of the stomach that something terrible is about to happen: that it is possible we are about to encounter poetry journalistically confessional, that every terrible thing the speaker encountered in the first section, “Parties,” is to be heightened to such retaliatory degrees we readers just might become collateral damage. So, we brace ourselves as we enter the poem “Fuck You,” as Smith writes:

Surprisingly, this is not what we expected, and Smith, as though with a wink, knows she has evaded our expectations because she quickly dismisses any trace of scorn, asserting: “That is the one thing I am not here to say,” continuing with greater specificity to proclaim: “I would never say it to you.” And who is this “you”: is it us, the readers? or any number of grief-perpetrators we’ve already encountered? If it is the latter, is this poem, then, the apologia Smith resists in “Beauty”? Or, since the “you” is characterized as being “so splendid and general,” is the “you” some heretofore unnamed persona we will have to read further in the section to encounter?

Later, in the second and third stanzas, Smith suggests the evolved person she is becoming:

What strikes me most is her use of the world “gilded,” how it denotes privilege, which, as we must remember, is the antithesis of the “hut” she lives in. Therefore, her throat is thick with phlegm. (But why? I will argue that “gilded air” represents the currency she has imbued all the problems in her life, as represented here in this book). Symptomatically, “phlegm” symbolizes its destructive powers. Therefore, when she is able to say “fuck you,” it is to the “gilded air,” to “green dust on everything” — to all things denigrating. And it is with this understanding that it becomes clear that Smith intends to say “fuck you” to Devastation as well. That this final section is the transfiguration that “Beauty” promises.

With an eye toward spiritual recovery, Smith begins to view life as an accumulation of the good and the bad as a holistic experience. As a result, the hut she has been living in gains new rooms and corridors to resemble a house, a dwelling large enough to accomodate her and her baggage. For example, in the poem “Seriousness,” she states that “I wore my honorable badness / badly” (p. 41). In “Paperweight Eiffel Tower,” she portends: “Because I knew everything / I could not avoid feeling / sometimes like a maggot / in the eye of a saint” (p. 46). However, these are not self-reproachful assertions; rather they illustrate how self-aware she is. And nothing evidences this than in the closing moments of the poem “Enormous Sleeping Women,” when she resigns herself to this fact: “I will take no / for an answer if it’s the right answer. For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty” (p. 56). I can think of no better metaphor for self-discovery, at least in recent memory, than this. There is more to unearth, as I imagine Smith herself does, looking forward to it, as implied in the final poem, “Too Bad”: “I am a tiny jelly cake / and today is to be my greatest adventure” (p. 62).

If only we could all be so whimsical.