WESTERN SKIES

Lonesome people inhabit a forlorn landscape in this poetic and photographic meditation on Texas.

Smith, an Austin-based singer/songwriter, arranges poems, song lyrics, brief essays, and photos into “a love song to the mythology of Texas.” The book’s soul resides in its dozens of images of the West Texas plains, which show scrubby, arid prairies with tufts of grass, weedy tendrils, clumps of trees—often bare and wintry—and the occasional yucca; the land dimly stretches away under threatening clouds until it meets hills that either sparkle with promise under a shaft of sunlight or form a black, imprisoning wall. The human presence is seen in artifacts: highways and railroad tracks converging toward the horizon; rust-stained Quonset huts and oil tanks; tires abandoned against a sagging fence. Photographed with an old Polaroid in black and white with a hint of sepia, these hazy, cunningly artless snapshots capture terrain that feels nearly vacant but suffused with meaning. Smith’s writings are similarly shaped by Texan vistas, whether in an essay on the geology of the plains, which were the bottoms of ancient seas before they became highways for herds and people, or in a plaintive love song that gives the book its name: “And the stars they are falling from your eyes / And my love, my love was on the rise / And I am in between you and some horizon line / Underneath the western skies.” Smith’s pen is as good as his camera at evoking the gritty physicality of the Lone Star State and opening it up to human energy and emotion, as in his entrancing poem “Necklace”: “Just after the first gas station coming into town, / I see abandoned oil rigs, houses with dirt and cactus front yards, / …. / A dual cab Ford truck screams / Up behind me and passes. / Two teenage white kids in the front smoke / And nod their heads to the bass crunch / Of some guy singing about life in Newark or L.A.” The result is a feast for the eyes and the imagination.

A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.