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Smith, Tracy K. Life on Mars. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2011.
It could be "pure force." It could be chaos, a storm. It could be floating emotionless in ice-cold outer space. It could be David Bowie. It could be God, and, if it were God, it could be it in so many ways. Tracy K. Smith is able to use the idea of it as a means to delve into the important questions one confronts when in the face of grief and loss-is there really a God, what is life all about, and where do we go when we die-as she searches for perspective and a sense of peace while elegizing her father in Life on Mars.
Life on Mars, Smith's third collection of poetry, includes thirty poems that are split into four numbered sections. In the first two sections, Smith uses the image of outer space as a vehicle to allow her to explore the even bigger concept of life's meaning, wondering if "Everything that disappears / Disappears as if returning somewhere." The image of space becomes all the more poignant when one finds out that Smith's father was a scientist who worked on NASA's Hubble Telescope. In the final section of the long poem "My God, It's Full of Stars," Smith describes her experience observing her father when the first images returned from Hubble:
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt shame
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second
time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is-
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
Smith weaves this cryptic it throughout the first section of Life on Mars. The it, at times, has no clear antecedent, while in other places it shape-shifts. In "The Museum of Obsolescence," it refers to the abstract idea of all the things that could have saved humanity, but it becomes more tangible as "It watches us watch it." In the first section "My God, It's Full of Stars," it takes a new form in almost every line before becoming the idea of a cosmic mother,...