Indeed, Padgett’s poems are so playful, self-mocking and eager to please that it would be easy to overlook their craft, not to mention the depth and sincerity of the emotions they convey.

Ron Padgett’s How Long (Coffee House, $16), one of two finalists for this year’s poetry Pulitzer, is also concerned with nostalgia and loss, but tonally it inhabits a different galaxy. So that I might be sitting now beside my fatherĪs he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipeįor the first time in the winter of 1959. Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke. The latter is particularly strong, making use of images from science and science fiction to articulate human desire and grief, as the speaker allows herself to imagine the universe They exchange smiles. / It’s so simple, they’ll be done by lunchtime.” Cosmically speaking, of course, we will all be “done by lunchtime.” An awareness of death permeates “Life on Mars.” Two of the longer poems, “The Speed of Belief” and “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” are moving elegies for Smith’s father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope. This equals that, one says, / Arranging a swarm of coordinates // On a giant grid. Is our universe “a house party,” as the title of one poem suggests, or a “primal scream,” as another would have it? “Is God being or pure force? The wind / Or what commands it?” Or might there be more than one God? “Maybe there is a pair of them, and they sit / Watching the cream disperse into their coffee // Like the A-bomb. Smith’s third book of poetry, Life on Mars (Graywolf, $15), which won the Pulitzer Prize this week, had better be prepared to face some stark metaphysical questions.

Life on mars by smith