Review of Dean Bartoli Smith’s “Baltimore Sons”
by Judy Johnson
Dean Bartoli Smith refers to his second poetry collection, Baltimore Sons, as the most painful love letter he has ever written. An unflinching look at gun violence in the United States—as well as at sports, particularly basketball, football, and baseball—Baltimore Sons is reflective of Smith’s background as a sportswriter in his hometown of Baltimore.
Along the way, the reader also learns of Smith’s family and their Irish-Italian heritage. His Italian mother and Irish paternal grandmother both wrote poetry, and Smith followed. Smith’s first poetry collection, American Boy, published in 2000, won the Washington Writer’s Prize, which is awarded by Washington Writers’ Publishing House to a Maryland writer for the best book published over the previous three years. The book also received the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001.
Smith’s next book—Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season—reflected his expertise in sports journalism and was published in 2013 by Temple University Press. The nonfiction book details the 2012 season of the Baltimore Ravens, who moved to the city after the Colts left for Indianapolis in 1983.
Spending the next two decades writing the poems collected in Baltimore Sons, Smith intended that the collection serve as both a wake-up call and an intervention for the city of Baltimore and the nation as a whole. The ideas of love and death, both literally and metaphorically, permeate the collection. The opening poem, “Six Shooters,” presents the death of trust between Smith’s father and the friend whose trust he betrayed. The final five poems deal explicitly with deaths: that of a baseball player, a baseball stadium, and Smith’s mother. Between those bookends are poems that speak of the death of Baltimore neighborhoods and citizens, most frequently from gun violence.
The collection is divided into two sections; the first part contains twenty-nine poems, while the longer second section holds thirty-four poems. Twenty-seven of the poems had been previously published across ten different publications. The poems encompass actions taken by members of his family, spanning four generations.
Many of the Part I poems deal with Smith’s childhood, and, most of them—far from lighthearted—feature guns. Some of the guns are “loaded,” some are not. Even the television programs, such as Adam-12 and Gunsmoke, that Smith enjoyed as a youngster and role-played with his friends, featured guns. In the prose poem “Howitzer,” Smith recounts the wars against the “redcoats, Apaches, Viet Cong, and Nazis in every battle” he and his brother refought with a variety of plastic guns.
In this section, Smith does not spare himself, writing in “At the Bel-Loc Diner” about his divorce. Additionally, several poems discuss his problems with drinking, a problem he shared with his father. His grandfather, known as Pop-pop, also appears in several poems and is gun-obsessed, as well. The poem “Baltimore” speaks of the .45 Pop-pop kept in the truck’s glove box for “protection” during the riots of 1968. It ends with this image:
He raised the nightstick toward me at a stoplight and lightly tapped my shoulder. It scared the hell out of me.
These lines remind the reader that all was not easy for the narrator growing up, despite the fun he had playing war and acting out stories of gunslingers.
Smith’s father’s purchase of a gun in the early 2000s became a catalyst for some of the poems in Baltimore Sons. The persona of these poems is a variation of Smith’s father, who, during the 1970s, had coached college basketball—thereby joining two of Smith’s ongoing interests. In fact, the initial title of the collection was My Father’s Gun. The overlapping language of guns and sports is exemplified in “Pure Shooter,” where Smith examines his father’s basketball skills.
Smith was born some months after what he calls a shotgun wedding; that is, his father and mother married only because they were forced to do so by her pregnancy. The collection begins with “Six Shooters,” explaining the circumstances of his birth with terse concluding lines that evoke betrayal and violence using gun imagery:
My father vowed to watch over his best friend’s fiancée, then moved in for the kill. Dad pulled his trigger first. Mom gave back the ring. I was born.
Smith was only two months old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and five years old when Robert Kennedy was shot. His parents divorced when he was seven. He felt that these events introduced him at a young age to pain and suffering, tuning him into the frequency of it.
The collection’s title comes from a poem in the book’s first section, “Baltimore Sons,” which uses 2017 statistics on murders published in the city’s newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. Smith lists the facts with a nearly clinical detachment:
the average victim with eleven arrests, the average suspect, nine, no motive for half of the killings, mostly Black, mostly male,
In addition to addressing gun violence, the collection also allows Smith to enter into conversations with several twentieth-century poets. His poem “Virginia Creeper” is dedicated to Charles Wright, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2014. Smith quotes two other writers in Part II. First, “Gwendolyn and Freddie” quotes Gwendolyn Brooks in its examination of the 2015 murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, likening it to the violence in Chicago that Brooks had seen:
young guns just like Freddie murdered in Chicago no different than in his hometown. … when it was showtime and she knew how fast the street ran in her own veins— How she longed to strut the streets with paint on her face, witnessing
Smith concludes with Brooks’s lines from “We Real Cool”:
as they drove him away:
He real cool.
He die soon.That poem is immediately followed by “Reading James Baldwin on Election Day in Charleston,” in which Smith alludes to the city’s slave trade days. As the couplets below demonstrate, Smith braided that era with a more recent event—nine members of the Church of Mother Emanuel were killed during a prayer meeting, a mere few months after Freddie Gray’s death.
The “blood-stained banner” of the South unfurls its blue sautoir, those hideous bars of rejection embraced by the blinkered and deadly dumb among us who amass guns like grocery items to feed new rebellions. The Church of Mother Emanuel is locked up: now a fortress against another invasion, her cross off-plumb, those bodies still
Another braided poem, “Shooting Gallery,” interweaves a grocery store shooting with the deaths of six adults and twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The poem is divided into four sections. The first section, set in a grocery store, concludes with the lines:
Automatic weapons kill people easy, like milk pouring into a bowl of Cheerios.
Later in the poem, he likens the children’s bodies to fragile piñatas, turning to lines by Nikki Giovanni to conclude the poem:
We are all targets. We are all unsafe.
Another poetic device Smith uses effectively is that of personification. Three poems are titled for guns that speak in monologues: “Shotgun,” “.357,” and “.45.” The narrator of poem “.45” explains that it lives in the car’s glove compartment for safety, assuring the reader:
of surprise at close range. My owner is not a bad man, just inclined toward freelance law enforcement, a fan of The Lone Ranger, and afraid that society as we know it is coming unhinged, and it makes him feel better to turn the pistol on the target of his anger. I’m just afraid that I will be used to shoot an unarmed stranger, and then be blamed, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
The poems in this collection are not only influenced by Smith’s family, personal experiences, and the work of other poets, but also Smith’s journalism background. Smith worked as a sportswriter in Baltimore after graduating from the University of Virginia. He would later go on to receive a Master in Fine Arts in Poetry in 1989 from Columbia University. When asked about the influence of his journalism background on the poetry in Baltimore Sons, Smith told Mike Maggio for DCTrending:
The book is reportage on one level—a journalistic scaffolding. I’m a narrative poet. These things happened. Then I’m drawn to the possibilities of irony and metaphor within that construct—what Stanley Kunitz referred to as the “psychic energy” of a poem. I’m trying to tell stories through poetry in a novel way, unchecked and unhinged at times.
In addition to sports writing, Smith also worked as director at Cornell University Press, where he initiated and led Project MUSE, which focuses on providing full-text academic works in the social sciences and the humanities. Since 2019, Smith has been director of Duke University Press, as well as an adjunct professor of publishing in George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies Program.
Smith’s journalistic and narrative abilities have free rein in Baltimore Sons, as exemplified in “Something to Cool You Off,” a poem about the murder of a young Black veteran, Booker T. Spicely, who was murdered in the Jim Crow world of 1940s North Carolina. Based on stories from other veterans, Smith brings the reader into a racially segregated bus and writes an imagined conversation between Spicely and the white bus driver. He wrote the poem after the death of Ahmaud Arbery, seeing the racist parallels between white men who claimed to feel threatened by and who lied about receiving threats from Black people.
Smith believes that Baltimore’s social fabric, already weakened by its racist divisions, ripped further with the tearing down of Memorial Stadium in the Waverly neighborhood. Although a new stadium was built in another location within the city, the old neighborhood suffered a heavy loss.
Illuminating how sports and sports venues directly influence that social fabric, one especially poignant poem, “McKenzie,” recounts the death of a three-year-old girl during a drive-by gun “battle”:
in a neighborhood that used to be full of baseball fans in the summer, that used to be joyous and exuberant before the stadium was torn down—
Smith also demonstrates that baseball’s tragedies could be seen both in former ball players and in ruined neighborhoods. “Final Out” offers a character sketch of pitcher Mike Flanagan, who played for the Baltimore Orioles. The manner of his death melds the collection’s double focus on sports and guns:
On a beautiful day for baseball, a shadow covered the pitching mound of your soul and you pointed a shotgun at your face and pulled the trigger.
Smith wears his erudition lightly, but on occasion, piles up allusions both contemporary and classical. In the poem “The Wrecking of Old Comiskey”—the baseball stadium in Chicago demolished in 1991 after having hosted eighty White Sox seasons—he writes of the “tangled medusa of grandstands” as the wrecking ball does its work. He references Greek mythology, likening the windows to the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, whom Odysseus blinded:
Those large cathedral windows that once gorged the field with light now they’re the eyes of Polyphemus— scorched and vacant ciphers.
One of the barriers that may prevent younger readers from fully appreciating the collection is the fact that these are memory poems from a particular era, exemplified by the baseball and football players mentioned by Smith. Unitas, Berry, and Moore are referenced in “Trash Night, Guilford.” The poem “Memorial Stadium,” dedicated to Dr. Abdul Jamaludeen, links Black and white stars such as Unitas—this time referred to as Johnny U—Jim Parker, Eddie Murray, and Cal Ripken. Smith blends these players and their sports-related harmony with the equally diverse fans in the stands cheering them on.
Not only baseball greats but also the television and film actors of the years of Smith’s childhood may challenge some readers who have no memory of characters such as Marshal Dillon and Festus. Lines from “Big Boy” pile up names of actors famed during Smith’s childhood but unknown to many younger readers and filmgoers:
to find the father. We loved the gunslingers—Mitchum, Widmark, and Wayne, gunning each other down.
The final section includes three poems about Smith’s mother’s death: “Misericordia Blues,” “Warrior,” and “Three Poems of Departure on Route 96.” The first details the last days of his Italian mother’s life and the (as it turned out) wrong decisions he and his brother made about her care. Misericordia is the Italian word for mercy, which is what emergency rooms are called in that country. “Warrior” describes his mother as looking “like an Apache warrior” when she laid in state according to Italian law. The reference may allude to an earlier poem in Part I, “Assassin Sonnet,” which concludes with the lines:
She spent half a life killing for me, clutching my sock from the balcony as I stopped to look back on my way to school, her long black hair against a white nightgown, her warrior gaze—murderous, beautiful.
The final poem of the section and collection, “Three Poems of Departure on Route 96,” recounts Smith driving in upstate New York, remembering his mother’s love for the music of Joan Baez and the collages she made of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Baltimore Sons is a sobering collection of poetry, with fully realized memories and distressing images. These are poems of loss and grief. However, Smith’s clear-eyed commitment to his family and to Baltimore—despite the sorrow that city encompasses—is admirable and encouraging.
I am currently writing meditations about aging, rooted in verses from the book of Psalms. I’m reading Stephanie Barron’s fifteen-book mystery series featuring Jane Austen, as well as a memoir/meditation about train journeys, Off the Tracks, by Pamela Mulloy. My website is judyjohnsonwrites.weebly.com.