He died in 2008, and “Life on Mars” is Smith’s wild, far-ranging elegy for him. Not that he stuck around: he joined the Air Force, and eventually worked as an optical engineer on the Hubble space telescope. Life on earth was particularly bad if you grew up black in the forties in Sunflower, Alabama, north of Mobile, as Smith’s father did. Wherever we were headed, in the vast, fathomless future, it wasn’t going to be outer space: the prospect of “life on Mars” was just another relic of our dreary life on earth.
David Bowie had a great, disillusioned single called “Life on Mars?” in 1973 (it inspired Smith’s title), about a girl forced to sit through the unendurable Hollywood fare of her parents’ childhoods-cavemen, cowboys, Martians, and the like. The Viking images of the planet’s surface made it look as inhabitable as cat litter. Kids who grew up in the nineteen-forties and fifties, in the grip of Mars mania, had their own kids in the seventies Smith, born in 1972 and a professor of creative writing at Princeton, was one of those kids, as was I. Smith’s new book of poetry, “Life on Mars” (Graywolf $15), recalls the mid-century craze for all things Martian.
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