What I think Smith does so well as a poet is she provides breathing room for the reader to absorb the world she’s painting. There is space to observe and allow one’s own thoughts to linger, or to fill in the blank. There’s also a close examination of lightness and darkness here, too, of feathers and sky and earth, motherhood and children.
She appears and disappears, much like I think she should. GOOD BONES presents a fragmented melding of a girl in the mountains, and she may be ancestral, ancient, sort of a sprite of mystique …like someone’s mother as a girl, perhaps. For me, a collection of poetry ‘works’ when the themes and motifs are repeated and used artistically, when they sort of collide and bounce off one another. I have been on a poetry kick lately because reading it always makes me a more insightful, deliberate writer–in whatever genre. GOOD BONES (Tupleo Press 2017), I’ll admit to following in love with based on the title alone, might be my favorite collection from Maggie Smith and I’ve read GOLDENROD as well as THE WELL SPEAKS ITS OWN POISON )both good, but GOOD BONES just spoke more tenderly to me, resonated in a way I was not expecting.
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Smith is a freelance writer and editor. Maggie Smith is the author of Keep Moving (Simon & Schuster, 2020), Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), and three prizewinning chapbooks. Follow on Instagram #alwayswithabook #booknerd ~WRITERS INTERVIEWING WRITERS| ALWAYS WITH A BOOK~ GHOST WEEK Featured Spotlight: THE POETRY OF MAGGIE SMITH
Artistic images of GOOD BONES, GOLDENROD, and THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON designed and photographed by L.Lindsay.
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