In his latest collection, Toronto-based poet Dale Martin Smith invites us into a vivid lyric landscape, a looping personal voyage of reckoning and return. In a series of spare evocative poems, framed by two lyric essays, Smith presents a search for meaning in terms of memory, the self, and national narrative. The Passenger inhabits multiple iterations of selfhood across time, spanning over 30 years and starting with site-specific images of the author’s experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Yemen in the early 1990s. The violence of US imperialism, the sacrifice of lives in the ongoing wars on terror, and the author’s own lived encounters between cultures trace an echo of mnemonic layering. Smith subtly guides the experience of embodied but unsettled subjectivity, questioning the dominance of Western idealism and what it means to contend with national identity through recollection.
