Push. By Ronald F. Smits. Scranton, Pennsylvania: University of Scranton Press, 2009. 78 pages. $10.00 hardcover.
This remarkably nostalgic journey begins with a boy playing with grandpa’s glass eye, citing the guidance of a grandfather and inviting us into a world of boyhood memories laden with jokes, falling in love, and the guilt along the way. Ronald F. Smits immediately lures us into a place where “even the clothespins smell good” and “the creek takes care of its own, / bearing the weight of centuries like a single leaf.” ‘The Water Pistol’ is a poem that typifies the nostalgia and rich language in Push (8). Smits tells of boys armed at school despite constant leaking, shooting each other in the fly and aiming for girls they have crushes on. Smits is strikingly vivid while remaining concise.
He tells us of collecting bottle caps, admiring the body of Venus, and discovering a stick of bubble gum in the wrapper of WWII picture cards. His repetition of words within a poem and occasionally into the next, provide a strong cohesion that benefits the themes of the book. The pushing during birth and pattern of moving from town to town succinctly carry Smits’ choice for language. The alliterative tendencies and infrequent rhyme add to the fun that Smits is clearly having, particularly in the opening poems.
Nevertheless, the heartbreaks of Push do arrive. The speaker loses a pink Spaulding ball in the sewer, sobbing until finding a way to reclaim it, visits a friend at the cemetery, and rides his bike from church to church in hopes of having an unrecognizable voice during confession. Even through these glimpses, Smits somehow pulls the rug from underneath the reader in ‘Bridges’ (27). Walking across bridges close to home, he suddenly is crossing one during the Vietnam War, “where, in the harbor, the wombs / of Victory and Liberty are pregnant with napalm, / the canisters as shiny as the milk cans of the car.”
Shortly after a great fear of water and living in the shadow of an older brother, Smits addresses the quieter moments and a passion for trees. We find him under an elm, startled at breakfast as a doe peers through the window, and simply admiring how rocks settled. By the concluding twenty poems of Push, Whitman comes to mind. Smits’ listing techniques and role as playful observer of the natural and industrial world echoes the bard. Yet Smits proves to be more humorous.
With Push, Ronald F. Smits has revealed his fervor with the lyricism of a musician and the abundant, detailed palette of a painter. Seventy-eight pages just aren’t enough.
Ronald F. Smits retired from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2008. His poems have appeared in College English, Free Lunch, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Poet Lore, Poet and Critic, Poetry East, North American Review, River Styx, The South Carolina Review, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry and The Texas Observer.
