"Transcendent . deceptively simple, deeply affecting. Most of the time, Ordinary Light seems to be a coming-of-age story about a middle-class black girl with a relatively idyllic life. If this were all that her memoir were, Smith would''ve succeeded in publishing something revolutionary: a book about a happy, financially solvent, high-achieving black family--more specifically, the story of the healthy, nurturing bond between a black mother and daughter. Too few books that fit this description exist. Black family memoir more often explores overcoming poverty, bad parenting, substance abuse, and trauma related to racism. Stories about black mothers and daughters are even scarcer.Though I don''t get the sense that Smith was concerned about the ways in which her memoir might serve to ''normalize'' the black parenting experience, it succeeds at doing so--for those who would need the existence of healthy black families confirmed--just by focusing on her parents'' presence and encouragement.
But the memoir is most powerful when it returns to the subject of her mother''s illness and Smith''s slow-dawning realization that she will not recover . It seems that, in writing about her [mother], she''s combing through the minutia of her childhood, adolescence, and early womanhood, searching for things she wishes she''d shared, instances when she might have been more honest, moments when she could have revealed more of her doubts or challenged her mother''s authority. And only in viewing those earlier, prosaic scenes through this retrospective lens does the ordinary become sublime. These later descriptions of small discoveries are profoundly moving--finds that threaten to unravel the reader . Ordinary Light is lovely, languid, and painful, at turns--much like the memory of a beloved and long-deceased relative. Grief breaks open in the smallest of moments, but it can result in gorgeous revelation and in an acceptance that can almost mimic peace." --Stacia L. Brown, Slate "Engrossing .
subtle and evocative . a luminous memoir about Smith''s early years with her own mother and protector, and the rites of passage a daughter and mother must endure as the child grows and finally breaks free. You don''t have to know Smith''s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry to appreciate her ability to interpret life in a way that feels both unique and universal . Smith is the youngest child among five in a loving black family suffused with a father''s dignity and a mother''s faith. She has the gift to see herself clearly, without apology or judgment. In her visits home from college, she developed disdain for her upbringing . Some two decades have passed since Smith''s mother left her. Smith now has three children of her own.
When they were born, she began to pray again, and this memoir feels like part of that prayer. There are many things we say and wish we could take back. Ordinary Light is about finally uttering what we left unsaid for too long." --Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "A lyrical reminiscence of an almost idyllic childhood in Northern California. The memoir overflows with memorable stories: a trip to Alabama; a trip to a ranch to pick fruit for her mother''s preserves: the love of books instilled by her father, an engineer with the U.S. Air Force who would go on to work on the Hubble telescope." --Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune Review "A memoir of race, faith and a mother''s devotion, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet .
The youngest of five children, Smith grew up like an only child, her siblings already away at college by the time she began to think about her place in the world. In Ordinary Light, she offers her reflections on what went into the making of her, from the chapters of Little Visits With God she used to read with her mother, to Seamus Heaney . An awareness of herself as a black girl breaks in on Smith by degrees. She would have her militant phase at Harvard. Her reading list was much like the one Barack Obama described in Dreams From My Father : Ellison, Hughes, Hurston, Baldwin, Wright. But in Ordinary Light her understanding of herself as a black American cannot be separated from her knowledge of herself as a woman and the experiences that contributed to it . No doubt the greatest influence on Smith''s maturity as a woman was her mother. She writes as a daughter who has lost her mother and is thinking of her own daughter .
Her inclusive lists of influences--Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa--testify that black identity these days is way past black and white." --Darryl Pinckney, The New York Times Book Review "Compelling . It''s rare that a memoir is so emotionally engaging that a reader may wish to reach back through time and envelop the author in a warm personal hug. But that''s the impulse Smith engenders in this account of growing up as a dutiful daughter in a small town in northern California during the 1970s and ''80s. But she''s more than a compliant child--she was preternaturally attuned to everything happening around her, and determined to find a place for it in her rich imagination . The fact that she is black does not immediately loom large on her mental horizon, but little by little, idle remarks from white friends and overheard family conversations knit themselves into a perspective that keeps her aware and on guard . At Harvard, she revels in the ''small freedoms'' of being on her own. But always at the center of her life is her overwhelming love for her mother, who dies soon after Smith graduates.
" --Edward Morris, BookPage "Evocative, moving, thought-provoking . a subtle, elegant meditation that reveals the profound in the quotidian--the layers of meaning in everyday events . The star here is the writing itself: Like a Noguchi table, Smith''s prose is sturdy, functional and at the same time exquisitely beautiful . The two big themes of Ordinary Light are race and religion, but Smith avoids the clichéd treatment these hot-button issues too often receive. Smith is black and proud, but she doesn''t so much tackle issues of race as resolutely face them down. As a result her account of the corrosive power of subtle racism rings truer than more overtly politicized treatments . Her reflections on religion are even more illuminating and unexpected. The child of an especially devout mother, she accepts the gospel and the conventional moral strictures that accompany it for most of her childhood.
But as a young adult, she must attempt to reconcile her more cosmopolitan sensibilities and experiences with a religious faith that, for her, has always come with short apron strings attached. She does not reject the church in favor of easy liberated atheism; instead she quietly insists of a faith replete with human complexity . Ordinary Light glows not from the flare-ups of dramatic conflict and trauma, but from the steadier supply of insight derived from the habits and gradual transformations of everyday life." --Richard Thompson Ford, San Francisco Chronicle "At the heart of Ordinary Light lies a loss that shakes Smith''s faith in the solidity of the world. Her mother has been gone two decades, and her quiet, questioning memoir is an act of recovery and devotion. [In] her mother''s last hours, Smith finds herself ''both frightened and reassured,'' and ''both crushed and heartened'' that death does indeed look and feel the way it''s described in hospice literature, even as it remains a mystery and a miracle. Throughout the book she often returns to this kind of paradox. Her journey from childhood to Harvard and to poetry is also a journey from her mother''s version of God to her own more expansive and characteristically questioning concept.
''Is God each of the many different things we seek in life?'' she asks herself after the birth of her own daughter. ''Family for a short time, and then independence, and then love?'' Her book is full of such questions, always reaching across the gap from daily life to the eternal." --Joanna Scutts, Newsday "One of the most-anticipated books of 2015. Though best known as a poet (and a damn good one), Smith never felt the medium allowed her to fully reflect on her family, her upbringing or the loss of her mother just after she finished college. So she turned to memoir. In Ordinary Light, Smith imparts tremendous grace and eloquence through an honest, unyielding consideration of her past . Revealing." -- Time Out New York "Exquisitely written .
eloquent, poignant. Smith grabs you from the first sentence. Her memoir is a search for her mother, through memories--visiting grandparents, interacting with much older brothers and sisters, encountering poetry for the first time, always aware of her mother''s presence. Smith folds us into her reveries and reminiscences with enormous grace, revealing the particularly vulnerable moments she experienced when she became a motherless daughter, and the lingering, everlasting question of what might have been, had her mother been with her into her own experience of becoming a mother herself. Ordinary Light is a lament, an homage, a discovery, a blessing." --Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com, "Ten Books to Read in April" "Smith, who won the Pulitzer for poetry, tells her life story so far, tracing her girlhood in a mostly white suburb to her years at Harvard, where she developed ''an intimate proximity'' with her African-American identity. Ordinary Light shines bright because of the warm glow the memoir casts on the simple everyday life of a young girl yearning to do great things .
Her spare yet beautiful prose transforms h.