Desert Rain: a review of Shaking Music from the Angry Air by Michael Dwayne Smith.

By Peter Mladinic

Desert Rain: a review of Shaking Music from the Angry Air by Michael Dwayne Smith. Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Russell, KY. 2025. $17.00 paper.

The first thing a reader notices is the book cover’s array of forms and colors: Artist LaWanda Walters’ painting depicts windows and a door of an adobe building that could be a church, with “the man in the moon” on top, a blossoming tree in the wall, another on the side, a slanted W in yellow, that could be lighting in a dark blue sky, and tinges of red, yellow, black, and white off to one side—all framed in a wood border inlaid with barbed wire. Vibrant and surreal. In one poem, the reader comes to the lines “He is a circle you call / your self. I am left thinking I am the whole / package at the wrong address.” A misfit? Not really. While the book itself comes full circle, the title also being the book’s last line, the poet himself, wandering, restless, and questioning is an integral part of the desert landscape, with its sunlight by day and starlight by night. The rain that falls greens the foliage, colors the blooms, and sustains the speaker. As the reader passes through the artist’s door, which is also the poet’s, they enter poems inhabited by family; friends, lovers, strangers; and the self that transfers the poems’ elegance into the lives of their readers.

There are ghosts in these poems, ghosts of people, animals, and things. There is mystery in the landscape, and within the poet the abiding notion that poetry is more about questions than answers. To begin at the end, “Family” is not about biological family, but about a communal gathering “at the Headless Horseman,” celebrating with song and dance. Celebrating togetherness. Which is also celebrated in”Screwy Rabbits,” as the poet speaks of “raising a great / kid with a great lady, me now the hippy-dippy grandpa.” But it wasn’t always this way. “My sister and I are still black-winged confederates, the night / still divorcing us from our parents,” he says, in “The Other Side of Night,” which begins “Mother getting there first, then my father, my little sister. / The dead, as the line goes, keep dying.” It’s a haunting poem. At one point he says, “We are together apart.” Going back in time, the poet enters “Desert Garden / Memory Care Senior Living” only to learn his father died five minutes before he got there. In “Footwork” the father is depicted as a man with his fists clenched. “The little shit could flick a jab with his left / quicker’n you could think,” a father who always seemed to be driving away. In the book’s opening poem, “Angelitas,” a childhood memory, family is what the son wants to escape from, “Mother’s / drunk by noon, father’s fist never unfolds.” Camped on a beach in Mexico, the son looks to the ocean for escape, only to see a boy swimmer in distress:

And then come the screams…
they spring up sharp from the bay, terrible and
piercing, an animal cry from a place in his gut
deeper than any god could go. He erupts from
the foam, furious legs and knotting tendon, as his
sleek body buckles, contracting, falling to shore,
blue stingers of maybe a hundred jellyfish lashed
to his chest.

The underlying message—there is no escape. The speaker identifies with the boy. “He was in the order now.”

Friends, lovers, and strangers are people the poet encounters “along the way,” and people who come back from the past. In “The Reading” the poet, part of the audience, hears a poem only to realize that it is about himself and his past relationship with the other poet. He recalls “1989, rustling / sheets in a motel, TV on to muffle little screams. / You were full bloom on the life and death edge of / your marriage.” One poem concludes with “gas station bathroom selfies,” which fittingly depicts the transitory nature of many of these relationships. In “Inside Straight / Shot in the Dark” “Julie stayed / in Needles, got a dog, got married, made American cheese / sandwiches every afternoon, and I moved to Alaska / to start over.” “In Bed with Time and Fire” concludes “I was never supposed to love you, I have always loved you, / an unforgiving furnace of stars will have us yet together.” Yet togetherness is arrived at in these lines from the love poem “I have no faith without you, your ten-gallon”:

We got hitched and called ourselves senseless.
Joke’s on us: we’re trapped in this silken pond,
floating with citrus rinds, under a circus tent
that rhymes with resilient. Beseeming—Satis.

Whichever god tried to curse us is bewildered.

The self in these poems is an integral part of their landscape.

There are purple and blue wildflowers in a field
behind the bankrupt strip mall down the road apiece.
There are eucalyptus, thick with leaves that surround

a broken-down stable, thick with noble ghosts of horses.

Another poem begins: “Let me tell you about the riotous golden rock-daisy / bloom along the riverbank and how no one can / get enough of the new mare.” And yet another begins: “I am addicted to the sound of water.” The above quoted passage and these aforementioned lines serve well to define the self in these poems.

The subtitle for the book’s first section is How shall I wear my identity? Appropriately, a question. The poet is, and is becoming. One constant is that he is, for his reader’s purposes, a human being alone in a room with language. There is one moment in this book where he talks about being never alone. Sometimes he is with animals, other times with ghosts, and still others with friends and family. At all times he is attuned to the world he inhabits, the yelps of coyotes in the distance, and the voices of people at his side. Part biography, part travelogue, part ledger, Shaking Music from the Angry Air, a book of scintillating beauty, is rife with the mystery of being alive.