Duende

Every poem is the story of itself.
Pure conflict. Its own undoing.
Breeze of dreams, then certain death.
—from “History”

Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death.

Tracy K. Smith’s bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. One poem tells of a Ho-Chuk Indian boy separated from his tribe by the government; another, written as a play, gives voice to Ugandan women kidnapped by rebel commanders and forced to become their wives; and others, with lyrical grace, describe the dissolution of a marriage, often against the backdrops of war and political violence. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.

“[Smith’s] lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter under the considerable weight of her subject matter.” —✩Publishers Weekly

“These poems make a ritual for forgiveness, insight and regeneration. This collection by Tracy K. Smith is a true merging of the ancient roots of poetry with the language of an age of a different kind of sense. Stunning.” —Joy Harjo

 “Tracy K. Smith synthesizes the riches of many discursive and poetic traditions without regard to doctrine and with great technical rigor. Her poems are mysterious but utterly lucid and write a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision.  They are deeply satisfying and necessarily inconclusive. And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious. Writers and musicians have explored the concept of duende, which might in English translate to a kind of existential blues. Smith is not interested in sadness, per se. Rather, in the strange music of these poems I think Smith is trying to walk us close to the edge of death-in-life, the force of hovering death in both the personal and social realms, admitting its inevitability and sometimes-proximity, and understand its manifestations in quotidian acts. This dark force is nonetheless a life force, which, in the poem “Flores Woman,” concludes “Like a dark star. I want to last.”  If Duende were wine it would certainly be red; if edible, it would be meat cooked rare, coffee taken black, stinky cheese, bittersweet chocolate. Tracy K. Smith’s music is wholly her own, and Duende is a dolorous, beautiful book.” —Elizabeth Alexander, judge’s statement for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets

Duende is a S.Mariella Gable book, an award given by the College of St. Benedict for an important work of literature published by Graywolf Press.