Few poets go on writing well into old age, but the Louisiana-born William Jay Smith is one of them. Still going strong, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday last year with two impressive new books. He was a Rhodes Scholar and served as a Democratic representative in the Vermont legislature, was poet laureate of the U.S. and poet-in-evidence at Columbia and Williams. His poetry, marked by great technical skill, is witty and satiric, poignant and humane. A complete man of letters, he’s also published memoirs, children’s stories, literary essays, an account of the amusing Spectra Hoax, and translations from French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian.

Smith’s Dancing in the Garden continues the story of his life after Army Bratand leaps from American barracks to French bistros. The memoir focuses on the summer of 1938 in Tours, in the Loire valley, when he was twenty years old and a student at Washington University in St. Louis. (It also sketches his wartime service in Hawaii, on a coral atoll, and as liaison officer with the French navy in North Africa and the South Pacific—which could well be the subject of another book.) This vivid and charming memoir describes his first love during one of the transforming experiences of his life. In the poet’s recollection of his first trip to France—a figure in one painting he sees wears “neck-ruffs so wide that spoons had to be made with