Patricia Smith, whom the The Boston Globe lured from her job as a feature writer at the Chicago Sun-Times six years ago, "was the type of person easily overlooked," says Lincoln Millstein, a Boston Globe vice president. Not so in Boston, where the marquee columnist has become a force to be reckoned with.
 After managing editor Gregory Moore of the Globe met Smith at a convention of black journalists, Millstein, then assistant managing editor for features, was struck more by the scorching use of language in her sideline - she has published three volumes of poetry - than by her Sun-Times entertainment clips.

When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes.I can think of no softer warning for the motherswho sit doubled before my desk,knotting their smooth brown hands,and begging, fix my boy, fix my boy.
- From "Undertaker"

 Hired as a pop music critic, Smith wrote in a formulaic style until Millstein urged her to loosen up and write as soaringly for the newspaper as she did for the people who came to dimly lit, smoky clubs to hear her read her poetry.

 Soon editors saw a columnist prospect in their writer's new-found style. They had to transform a feature writer into a better street reporter, though, and Smith's development included covering the Rodney King case in Los Angeles and the South African election in 1994. In May of that year she was given the Metro column, a plum job at a writer's paper. From the start, Smith filled her 800-word space with confident, full-throated essays on subjects ranging from her garden to murders in the neighborhoods to municipal corruption, always swaying somewhere between poetry and prose. But she says she was surprised by the assignment and for a time felt like an impostor, self-conscious about her limited hard-news experience. She believes she contributed to some newsroom resentment in the beginning by not asking for help when she needed it.

 And there were complaints, from fellow staff members as well as readers, that Smith wrote too much about race. The Globe's ombudsman, Mark Jurkowitz, wrote two years ago that no Globe writer provoked more passionate response from readers than Smith. Moore attributes much of the negative passion to misperception of her role and special voice. Historically, there had been a "tremendous absence" of a black viewpoint in the Globe, he says, and "when you go from zero to sixty, it seems like you're going really fast."

 Smith, forty-one, writes out of her experience. She grew up lower-middle-class in a west-side Chicago apartment, nurtured by a poetry-writing father who also read to her from the Sun-Times and a mother who "taught me to shine on my own." Her father's murder by a robber when he was forty-two and she was twenty is a wound that doesn't heal. When she was twenty-one she bore a child with a man who left her. It was a journalism class at Northwestern that led her to newspapers.

 She can inject unusual passion and conviction into her writing. Few writers could so convincingly call the Roxbury neighborhood, Boston's black ghetto, "the ideal place" as she did, ascribing to the community the vibrant rhythm of her childhood Chicago. "There were high-fives and Sunday struts," she wrote. "There was the meat market, where my mother dragged her good shoes through the sawdust while fussing incessantly over the cheap cuts of pork and beef. There were pigtailed girls kicking double-Dutch and boys who tossed balls through hoops roped to street signs. There were knifings, layoffs, layaways, and all-night card games. There were taverns that pumped blues from every pore and Holy-Rolling churches to redeem the Saturday night revelers. There was life everywhere."

 In time, Smith ignored the complaints that her columns focused excessively on race and listened to those who found her perspective enlightening. "If you're writing about what matters to the city, most of the time it's going to be connected with race somehow. It's just the nature of the city."

 Her first foray into investigative reporting had a racial component, a series of columns last spring accusing the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority of overlooking rampant, long-standing, in-house racial harassment and discrimination. The columns engendered heated denials from "T" officials, some of them black. Managing editor Moore, for one, backed his reporter. That federal officials are investigating the "T" and the state is trying to force a settlement of the discrimination charges "shows that she's right," Moore says.

 In print every Monday and Friday, Smith is also seen and heard live every Wednesday night at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, where she hosts an open-mike, competitive "poetry slam."

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