Book Review - In This We Are Native by Annick Smith
In This We Are Native
Annick Smith
Lyons Press
Annick Smith isn’t a household name, her stories don’t appear in the New Yorker, and outside of a unique circle tucked in the Pacific Northwest, she’s without a mythology; but to those aware of Annick Smith’s brilliance there’s a collective (and conscious) awe. As a civic environmentalist, Smith walks within a profound state of reason, and as a practicing writer, there are few who work with a higher sense of conviction. To Annick Smith, "Comfort is nice, but it has little to do with serenity."
For the last decade, and a good portion of the one prior, I’ve been familiar with Annick Smith. As a struggling author in search of biographical clues to the poetic mindset of the late Richard Hugo, I was lucky enough to share a table with Smith, her long-time beau William Kittredge, and my own best friend (and fellow poet) Roger Kirschbaum. The Depot Bar and Grill in Missoula, Mont., was unnaturally cool for such a dusty June. The gin was grizzly. The stories littered with stolen cars, hewn-log cabins, and the endured grief we all must face if given the years to discover it.
Annick Smith doesn’t avoid this shared grief. From its earliest chapters, In This We Are Native allows us to witness how "the land tilts down the Bear Creek watershed toward the Big Blackfoot River" where Smith’s late husband, filmmaker Dave Smith, "made elaborate plans to restore the meadows and flume, build ponds for migrating waterfowl, [and] plant orchards." Alas, "he died before his plans could be made real." Of the latter, Smith gives us the awkward gift of her husband’s final years, the move they made to Los Angeles in search of film industry employment, their unfulfilling stint in a cramped Hollywood apartment, and their eventual retreat to Bear Creek Road and the Montana they both found remarkable in its familial simplicity.
In This We Are Native doesn’t stop there, though Smith’s four sons populate the remainder of the book with an assortment of domestic cats, dogs, wild cougars, grizzlies and fine brown trout. Yes, Montana’s wilderness becomes an extended family for Annick Smith, and its clear-cut plunder by economically greedy corporations appears as devastating to Smith’s sense of wonder as the spring she buried her husband in the Old Catholic cemetery in Missoula. To those tangled in urban sprawl, this may seem ludicrous, a belief hatched on a friendly critic’s tongue, but Smith’s direct prose will quell any such notion.
Whether in Tijuana tending to an ailing aunt, or driving the freeway south from Amarillo en route to Palo Duro Canyon, Smith proves a "regional" writer is not one who’s chained to a landscape, but one who populates it modestly, commits it to memory, and is made more humble by conveying its beauty through a solitary art form. If Smith is right, In This We Are Native is regionalism at its best.
Delicious
• 
Digg
• 
StumbleUpon
• 
Propeller
• 
Reddit
• 
Magnoliacom
• 
Newsvine
• 
Furl
• 
Facebook
• 
Google
• 
Yahoo
• 
Technorati
• 
Icerocket
Post new comment