With The Coral Sea, Patti Smith—poet, artist, rock 'n' roll legend, wave-maker, and genuine Renaissance Woman—has created yet another awe-inspiring work, in this case something very different than the rock 'n' roll of her other albums. This one, a double-disc set of live recordings, features two live performances of Smith's epic spoken word poem "The Coral Sea" (published in a book of the same name in 1997).

When Patti Smith releases new material, I never know quite what to expect, but I can always count on it being profound and effectual enough to elicit some humanitarian type of change in me for the better. I am convinced that, like the Lizard King, she too can do anything.

My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields accompanies Smith here for two poetic excursions performed at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, one of which took place in 2005, the other 2006. Shields offers warbling, electronic crescendos and distorted guitar lines.

Each performance takes up an hour-long disc; each is a haunting, hypnotic continuous track of Smith's intimate tribute to her friend, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The Coral Sea takes us along Mapplethorpe's spiritual odyssey into the afterlife; the photographer lost his life to AIDS in 1989.

"From a place apart, Morpheus, god of dreams, awakes," Smith divulges the first line to a hushed crowd, and you can almost hear their heads reeling—the silence in between Smith's powerful opening words teeming with sophical antennae straining to grasp what seems a mythical dream world. Yet Smith speaks of nonfiction from her own poetic, analytic perspective.

From the misty breath of Morpheus, Smith brings us back down to our hero's deathbed: "It's not the physical pain—I could endure it, 'til the end of time—it's the pain of disappearing—of being gone." A devastatingly truthful, intense moment leading up to Mapplethorpe's demise recreated by Smith and Shields—a moment as real as placing one's hand upon a lit stove. The burn lingers within our heads and fingertips as it does in the pinch of Smith's clenched, yet determined voice.

Somewhere between Yeats's blur of the natural and supernatural, and Rimbaud's emotional urgency, between the social allusions of William Blake and topical ballads of Bob Dylan, Smith carries on as a poet of here and now. She speaks of only the most worthy causes, The Coral Sea being no exception.

I imagine that as when young pupils sat mesmerized around a giant flame as the great orator Homer raised his arms and voice and divulged stories of Gods and heroes, Smith enraptures us with as much vehemence, wisdom, and intensity. With The Coral Sea, Smith solidifies her position as a twenty-first century sage of what humanity holds most sacred, and it would behoove us all to sit still and listen.

The kind of music that Smith is most famous for is fittingly absent in this endeavor. In place of the righteous, fist-pumping rock 'n' roll that first earned our lustful attentions, Shields provides the perfect hypnotic supplemental tones with expert timing to Smith's climactic narration.

How fatalistic that Mapplethorpe, the man who produced the iconographic images which helped to introduce Patti Smith to the world in 1975 with Horses, in death is immortalized by Smith's passionate elegy.

"Don't cry," we hear Mapplethorpe deftly command through Smith's voice, "don't cry 'cause I'm gonna fucking die -- give me tears of joy because I'm gonna live fucking forever!"