Life on Mars

Author Tracy K. Smith
Vote 6/10
Reviewed on 2020-02-24
Read in English

I never read Poetry. Maybe I’m wrong.

I enjoyed this book. At the same time I felt uneasy about it, maybe because I feel like something about its meaning is continually escaping me.

I realize that I like a poem more when I don’t need context to understand it; or when somehow I do have context, and it’s not impossibly tedious (like it’s happened many a time when studying The Divine Comedy as a teen-ager). This book provides a few notes which are useful to make clearer an otherwise obscure poem, but a few others were totally beyond my grasp.

Even like this, reading good poetry (as I think this book is an example of) always stirs forgotten and uncomfortable parts of our life that would otherwise escape our noticing. And it would be a pity.