By Patti Smith
Virago, NZ$36 | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

PATTI SMITH’s poetry is her music – and her music is her poetry. She writes poems as lyrics, whether they become ‘songs’ or stay on the page, it is always Patti Smith’s voice. And even reading these new poems – her first volume in many years – it is impossible not to imagine Patti Smith performing them; her voice giving life to these words. Stuffier critics might not appreciate Smith’s abilities as a poet for the page, but Auguries of Innocence deserves to exist as a volume of poetry.

Smith is no charlatan poet – an ex-rock-star determined to turn her hand to writing (as was the case with the erstwhile Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan and his Blinking With Fists poetic attempt). It is worth remembering (and a new generation learning) that Smith was (and is?) a poet first and foremost. She was discovered in the early 1970s when her work (with the photographer and occasional beau, Robert Mapplethorpe) lead to connections with the burgeoning cool-crowd, the hipster scene at CBGB’s – when punk was on the verge. Smith flirted with and courted the likes of Tom Verlaine (Television), Richard Hell (The Voidoids) and Lenny Kaye.

She went from being a part-time performance poet – her driving, shamanistic lyrical performances backed by the rock’n’roll Howl of Kaye’s searing guitar – to being a full-time musician. Horses, that extraordinary debut album, is as important as a volume of rock’n’roll poetry as it is a prime/primal example of the power that literary punk possessed. And since the late 1970s music has been part-time for Smith. She took a break for most of the 1980s – and then again in the early 90s. During this time she was writing, taking photographs, working as an artist – releasing only small amounts of her gatherings to the public. She remains an intense force of life as a private poet, and as a public artist – often reluctant but always forthcoming once the decision has been made to act and engage.

‘Birds Of Iraq’ is the centerpiece of this volume, the tower around which shorter lyrical pieces sit like footholds, allowing the reading to get a grip and scale these columns of words. The devotion to the early work of Rimbaud is still evident, there’s a nod to the bardic tendencies of Ginsberg – and always with Smith she is happiest in her irreverence when she is being political; wishing a death on reactionaries, challenging the cloth-eared with her music and the weak-eyed with her words. This is not an easy read – and it’s far less instantly engaging for me than Leonard Cohen’s poetry, but where he focuses on himself within the world, Smith is constantly questioning what the world around her has to offer and what she in turn can attempt to bring to it.