The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970--2000 : LSU Press : 9780807125496 : 0807125490 : 30 Apr 2000 : In The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970- 2000, Dave Smith's poetry reveals its roots in the elegiac tradition that has marked a southern literature so prominent in the twentieth century. Yet equally visible, now, is the ancestral shadow of the Anglo-Saxon poetry of religious questing and the inner voyaging of dreams. With runic parables of nature and its implacable force, Smith's narrative style is a gritty, ever realistic presentation of human di-lemmas in a world both familiar to us all and eerily strange. Here the actions of character contest the principles of grace, courage, manliness, and fate for what matters. Sailing Atlantic waters, exploring domestic relationships, or plumbing memory for a personal and cultural identity, Smith dramatizes a vision of obligations we honor and, often enough, also fail, moments in which we may touch our origins and what philo