She dances incessantly on the precipice between the ephemeral stream of lived experience and its aesthetic framing, which is inherently reductive and fragmentary (and therefore tinged with absence). But the nostalgic sensibility she personifies is also intricately tethered to her identity as an artist. A great deal of these encounters manifest as phantom visions of her beloved late husband and brother. Smith’s narration of her own consciousness is saturated with fleeting images of loss. Certain objects and environments might appear to offer contact with a bygone era, but their intoxicating effect actually lies in the fact that they always deny us that contact. The past can only ever exist as a story we tell ourselves. Reading of Smith’s attraction to such tombs, I was reminded of Susan Stewart’s exquisite book On Longing (1992), in which she masterfully delineates the nostalgic impulse. One can only speculate on whether or not Plath would appreciate the gesture. At times, her susceptibility to their allure is breathtakingly intense.Īn eccentric example: while hovering over the grave of Sylvia Plath, she confesses an uncontrollable urge to urinate, so that the dead poet might feel some “proximate human warmth”. She explores and contemplates a vast array of relics, souvenirs and landscapes of ruin. Smith is more interested in the impossible promise of reminiscence than in any event it professes to bring to life. The meandering narrative structure and its portrait of transient endeavours conspire to deliver a profound meditation on the spectre of absence resting at the centre of all performances of remembrance (not least of which: the memoir itself). Perhaps to the surprise of some, Smith’s disavowal of plot makes for an utterly tantalising read. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable artists at work today.Patti Smith performs on stage at Burgtheater in Vienna. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature and coffee.

Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima.

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook.

Train patti