Sam Schmidt, Dark Bird, Galileo Books, 2024, ISBN: 978-0-913123-43-0, pp. 83, $16.47
Sam Schmidt’s book-length poem, Dark Bird, is an exciting open door into the unknown nature of maturing in an everyday American setting, not because the suburban landscape is new, nor because anyone lacks access to books and bibles, but because we are new, born into this living evolution. We are learning in time without trial-run or do-over. So, enter this modest world of a family of four, a mysterious tree outside the window enticing yet mute, and a dark bird that sings from within and without. Soon enough, there’s a demon of silence concerning matters one cannot face yet as well as what’s simply unknown. Schmidt, a long-time Baltimore poet and author of a prior book, Suburban Myths (2012), hinges from realism to symbolist insight in his second book, Dark Bird, with convincing fluency. Dark Bird is more experience than description. This poem’s plainspoken diction is married to uncanny symbolism blooming out of the familiar.
As the ostensible speaker of this serial poem, Schmidt writes in awe of nature, both of its vitality and its brutality. So he describes a robin:
. . . . in your fear and his wings
against the sky, you see the messenger
of blood who cries, This world
is no game, no dream you wander in.
Defend what you have.
In terms of a reviewer’s role, T.S. Eliot suggests in “To Criticize the Critic” and other essays that a reviewer should draw attention to worthy new publications and seek to place them in context. With this in mind, Dark Bird begins with a family man’s reckoning with a tree, resonant yet mute, provoking exploration and memory. Venturing out, Schmidt encounters a bird that might be, at times, the bird of inspiration, of poetry, of fate, of nature, of a crow looking for food, or an odd duck in an everyman’s day. The speaker wrestles with his father’s legacy and lack of expressed love for him, his wife’s cancer and her fortunate survival, with childhood’s perceived joy and gall, with daily routine, all with fleet brevity and potent symbolism as the day speeds on.
Dante Alighieri famously opens The Inferno with a translation of Italian equivalent to: “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straightway was lost.” In Dark Bird, the speaker has walked the plank of the American middle class, of his middle age and of American consumer society. Looked at from a Joseph Campbell perspective, this suburban myth is not satisfying and cannot contain what he and his family experience. In an everyday American neighborhood, a pulsing, mysterious tree haunts and entices. The poet-speaker finds that he has married his best friend and that his long marriage includes both exhaustion and love. He finds himself luckier than expected yet also haunted. He finds multiplicity and simplicity.
Unlike the main character in Tolstoy’s novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, who only faces his life on his deathbed and can’t digest that blur, Schmidt’s conducting his reckoning now. In this regard, Dark Bird is a brave book and a heartening testimony. To contextualize further, this poetry exists in the Romantic tradition in calling the reader, by honesty of example, to more fully live.
In the endlessly playful question, What is Poetry, I have decided that ‘deep reckoning’ is one way to describe what cannot be paraphrased. Deep reckoning is, at minimum, diving into the wreck, as framed by Adrienne Rich. The poet must craft the treasures brought back. Schmidt’s deep reckoning in Dark Bird is a wild and fun ride. Schmidt writes, maybe about the dark bird of inspiration, or a nearby crow:
A crow calls from the top of a pine.
If its cry were a spell,
the wind would start. Grow strong.
Fling me into the sky.
Why did I strike the tree like a gong?
The sentinel crow calls twice.
Another crow joins it. They flap off.
(p. 13). Let me quote a more abstract moment:
Inhabit happiness.
Your happiness is so constructed,
you are always standing apart
and admiring it.
If you should find yourself in a high wind,
holding on for dear life,
do the prudent thing and let go.
(p. 22). Schmidt translates this creative energy into fast-paced imagery spoken in colloquial diction. The expository language above is carefully woven into the scene of a person “standing apart” from their own happiness, rather than enjoying it. It’s made less abstract by the visual metaphor. The line breaks ante up the tension as the phrasing breaks the story across enjambments.
If you like the poetry of Robert Bly, the adventure of Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, the ancient English poem “Dream of the Rood,” or the contemporary mythologizing of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, then Dark Bird offers some original imagery and palpable written verve. As Whitman might say, it is “nature without check with original energy.” The wild energy here becomes more scattered between pages 44 to 83, as the deep material may have evaded some closing craft choices.
Toward the end, Schmidt writes:
The world empties of everything
but yes or no.
Any gods you have not met personally must go.
You must decide who is your friend.
(p. 80). I like how the journey of this book approaches choice here. It approaches both the door and the limit. Another closing theme of Dark Bird is “autumn.” In the last dozen pages, autumn appears as a son having outlived his elderly father (“I imagine my father as a boy”) (p. 83). Schmidt also reflects upon the “autumn complexion of your face” (p. 81). Meanwhile, the “wind blows harder” (p. 77) after the “doors of summer have been pushed shut” (p. 73).
Dark Bird is a unique addition to American poetry, one within the Romantic and symbolic tradition as well as a portrait of a rich interior world on the stage of American middle-class life. It shows us once again that Yeats was being the ultimate modern romantic by calling himself, “the last of the romantics.” The living imagination finds fusion in Dark Bird.
© Sam Schmidt and G.H. Mosson
Sam Schmidt is the author of Dark Bird (Galileo Press 2024) and Suburban Myths (Beothuk Books, 2012). From 1993 to 2004, he was a founder and editor of WordHouse, Baltimore’s newsletter for writers, and co-editor of the anthology Poetry Baltimore: Poems About a City. His poetry has appeared in the Maryland Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Gargoyle, Poets Against War, and The Potomac: A Journal of Poetry and Politics. His work has been anthologized in Weavings 2000, Maryland’s millennium anthology edited by Michael Glaser. Schmidt received his MA from the Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
G.H. Mosson is the author of two books and three chapbooks of poetry, including Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (FLP 2019). His third full-length collection, Becoming, is forthcoming from David Robert Books in 2025. His poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, The Evening Street Review, Smartish Pace, Loch Raven Review, The Potomac Review, The Hollins Critic, and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. He has MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where he studied prosody on a teaching fellowship, and MFA from New England College. A father, writer, lawyer, and dreamer, he lives in Baltimore County, Maryland. For more, seek www.ghmosson.com.
The Loch Raven Review 