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Book Review: My Poetry Book: Freedom to Change by J.E. Trotman Smith
Freedom to change
Guyanese writer offers a poetic gem, like no other.
Dr Glenville Ashby
Smith’s work is richly packaged and designed, a design befitting its glowing content.
In this gem of a work, Smith, an accomplished author and poet, covers ground, lots of it. From her ecstatic tribute to America’s first black president to her forays into the immutable world of the spiritual, she is unmistakably definitive. In Keep Us, she is prayerful, invoking, supplicating God in the vein of the Psalmic tradition.
“Keep us healthy, Keep us safe. Keep us always, in your grace. Help us not to be dismayed, for your love is always there!”
Smith is equally comfortable on social and political issues…tapping into the frustration of the hopeful, sorely beguiled by elected officials in A Blatant Waste of Time: “In two shakes of a tune, I would have Healthcare, Educational Laws Flying off The Stool… No more waste of citizen’s precious time. I would say, ‘Here are your laws, just waiting to unwind,’ while reprimanding them, for a blatant waste of time.”
Her transition is effortless, indiscernible. It is an incomparable fluidity…faultless.
Smith proves her salt as profoundly mystical, detailing the virtues of simplicity and gratitude – elements missing in a world collapsing under the weight of entitlement and covetousness. In Thank You God, she intones, “Thank you for strength. Thank you for filling us with your grace and mercy…Thank you for time to sleep, thank you for food to eat…”
To Smile Again, reinforces that message of gratitude.
Hers is an anthem that centres on the power to choose. We create our own reality. We are the architects of our heaven, our hell, she is convinced.
In I Choose, she asserts: “I choose tolerance, not impatience…Contentment, not greed. It is my right to make good choices. I choose…To choose.”
But for those who have succumbed, she cautions others, asking for empathy. “So remember compassion. And grace to all. For you can never tell when it will be…your call!”
“Freedom to Change” is a poetic masterpiece, penned by a tested soul. This is not the musings of the uninitiated, the unbaptised. Smith has been in the belly of the beast, wrestling with adversarial scenarios – physical and mental – emerging bruised but not battered and crestfallen. The past and the pain pour from her in Still Standing, To Smile Again, and On Being Homeless. In For My Brother, the nostalgia, her lamentations over her fallen sibling are poignantly raw. But like the proverbial phoenix, she soars. A veritable testament to the invariable power of faith and the human will.
Her experience invokes biblical images of Jacob’s Ladder – a painstaking ascension from an existence once mired in hopelessness. In When God Sends Angels, she basks in the innate goodness of humankind. We are all capable of being God’s messengers. Smith deftly marries deism and humanism. Why quibble over nuances, she suggests. Do we not come from the same source?
“…They were Sarah and family, Coworkers and Neighbours too…,” she writes. These are every day individuals who radiate empathy and kindness…God’s love.
The eponymous, Freedom to Change transcends the personal journey of Obama, her words recapturing tribulations and redemption, so soothing to the oppressed: “Torn by race, Debarred by hatred, Soured by Indifference, Blessed by a sacred gift, Struggles for Acceptance, Mindless Rejection, Sense of Belonging, Of Giving, Of Sharing.”
Smith touches a social nerve, ably grappling with a wide spectrum of human emotions. Pride, hubris, despair, selfishness, grace, and veneration for the sublime, all form a compelling poetic montage. Her work reflects the power of literalism, avoiding the abstraction and the complexities of multilayered interpretations. She opts for Occam’s razor – sometimes, the right choice. This explains her markedly emotive appeal. “My Poetry Book: Freedom to Change” is an existential triumph in the philosophical vein of Victor Frankl and Rollo May – two notable pioneers of this genre. Unquestionably, an accolade richly deserved.
glenvilleashby@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter@glenvilleashby
My Poetry Book: Freedom to Choose by J.E. Trotman Smith
Dat-Nef-E-Cnt Illumination Production
New York, New York
Photographer: Lenny Wang
ISBN 978-0-615-39174-8
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