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If you\u2019re from Texas, or the West, or maybe miss either, love both, then come get you some: Darden Smith\u2019s Western Skies<\/i> is a remarkable, stunning, visceral slice of West Texas you simply must live and breathe and savor.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cSimply\u201d is the key, from the dry, sun-faded physicality of the hardcover itself, to the bones of the poetics, the ghostly gorgeous photography, and the jangly-easy melodies. And you really should judge this book by its cover: it\u2019s a faded red Allsup\u2019s font on a shotgun-pocked Texas 82 sign Guthrie bound as you mind the speed trap leaving the Seymour DQ. This collection will take you home to the wide, flat Panhandle, safe, warm, and dry.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Western Skies<\/i> is a holistic mashup of sight, sound, feel, and remembrance. Some might call this sensory conglomeration experimental, but it\u2019s really not. Actually, this multimedia work comprises the genius of the nineteenth-century aesthetic that revolutionized art, literature, and the British Royal Academy. \u201cTo see clearly,\u201d John Ruskin, the Grand Poobah of aestheticism, said at the time, \u201cis P<\/span><\/span><\/span>oetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.\u201d To that Darden has added music, which would be the envy of the Rossetti brothers, founders of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic rebellion Ruskin endorsed. The Rossettis and their Outlaw Brotherhood made no distinction between poetry and song, and Smith\u2019s fusion of the two is remarkably seamless.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The book is divided into \u201cwritings\u201d first, then \u201csongs\u201d which again, echoes the foundational aesthetic precept that there\u2019s no division between poetry, song, sight, and sound. That\u2019s much easier said than done, but Smith does it, and makes it look easy\u2014which it certainly is not. The photos, spontaneous, burnished, costly and so practicality-constrained, add yet another artful sensation that layers a soulful depth in the Latin classicist term \u201cUt pictura poesis<\/i>,\u201d or poetry like pictures. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Consider the track \u201cNot Tomorrow Yet,\u201d which you can listen to\u2014and watch\u2014here<\/a>. In fact, if you\u2019re not facile with poetry, I\u2019d recommend watching the video and hearing the song before reading the verse itself. The music conveys the melodious lyrics that transcend bare text\u2014the polysyndeton structures of repetition become waves lapping a shore in Smith\u2019s easy, neo-Jackson Browne voicing. Lyrics whisper a dusty wind; meter clacks like a locomotive on railroad steel or highway slabs thumping below pickup tires. You live the prose like a dream barely remembered, but real just the same.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n