The things you've said and done

On Midlife by Matthew Buckley Smith

The Little Review (“a new pocket-sized magazine for anyone interested in poetry”) has quickly become one of my favourite (little) magazines, not least because it really is designed to be carried about in your pocket and I do a good 50% of my reading on the tube.¹ But also because they are committed to the art of the review, and know that poetry isn’t always the most interesting thing about poetry.

You can subscribe to their newsletter, which includes gems like CG’s piece on Sylvia Plath’s prose, here on Substack.²

Two specimens, suitably dog-eared

They throw good parties, too. The review below, of Matthew Buckley Smith’s second collection, Midlife, was first published in Issue 2 last November. One cold, rainy Saturday, I went along to read at the launch party on a cosy old boat in Canary Wharf (a distinctly un-cosy area: the contrast was surreal).

How do you perform a review? We agreed I’d simply read something from the book, without any discussion, so I read ‘Object Permenance’, of which more below. I am glad to say several people came up to me afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed it and asking to see a copy of the book itself (which was quite possibly the only copy in the UK at that point), promising to get hold of one.

It was a strange, and strangely gratifying, experience. Though it has its pleasures, at the end of the day reviewing is always a strange and solitary task. I often find myself mentally distancing myself from a book, and the review itself, once I’m done. Suddenly, I was the book’s ambassador, enthusiastic about the poems all over again and basking in their borrowed glory. Perhaps all critics should be given the opportunity to impersonate their victims.³

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[REVIEW] Midlife by Matthew Buckley Smith (Measure, 2024; $25)

First published in The Little Magazine

When it’s not being shared on the internet, most poetry moves across borders slowly and at great expense. The process by which some American poets and not others are received in the UK, for instance, is opaque and unpredictable. The trade in the opposite direction, meanwhile, doesn’t bear speaking of, which is to say it doesn’t exist.

I first came across Matthew Buckley Smith’s poems on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Smith is an American poet, living in North Carolina. You won’t find his second collection, Midlife, on bookshelves in England. It might take some time to get to you in the post. I am grateful to the publishers for sending me a copy for review.

The poem I came across online was ‘Poem Without Metaphors’. It does what it says on the tin: it is a list of things which are exactly as they are, without metaphors. I thought it was one of the best poems I had read in a long time, because it had the guts to rhyme, and to stick to its conceit (‘The rain against the glass is only rain, / Your heart is just a muscle in your chest’), and because the end was both devastating and ambiguous.

Somewhere a car is racing through the night
No faster than a swiftly moving car,

A brace of deer glance up at something bright –
Gone still, exactly like the deer they are.

And as for you, you could be anyone
Who’s done, who’s said, the things you’ve said and done.

I don’t quite know what this means, but I know that I am implicated.

America is the land of extremes and this is true for its poetry as much as anything. Its ‘formal’ poets are more self-consciously formal than ours are; its ‘free verse’ poets avoid metre like the plague. From a distance, it looks like there are two traditions reacting against each other. Increasingly, the divide seems to be experienced and/or perceived as ideological, to everyone’s detriment; conservatives write in metre, liberals write loosely (this is a general observation: I don’t know anything about Smith’s politics and wouldn’t guess from his poems).

This is a bad and boring situation. Sometimes I think we are heading in a similar direction on this side of the Atlantic. This would be a very bad and very boring thing for British poetry. You can’t write an honest poem while looking over your shoulder. You can’t write well while leaving half the tools in the box.

One of the reasons ‘Poem Without Metaphors’ is so successful is that the final line slows the whole thing down. It reads as though it has more stresses than it should. Often the poems in Midlife are a little neater in their rhythms. Often they are a little too neat. The same holds true for the rhymes. There can be the sense, which I often get from American formalist poetry, of something snapping into place:

When we hear the news your neighbour shot herself,
I’m slow to link her name to the smiling face
We see every Christmas at your parents’ place
And each morning on our fridge, dressed as an elf.

At best, the strict form is in productive, unsettling tension with the subject matter. At worst, it is funnier than it means to be.

The poems in Midlife range from shorter lyrics, often rhyming A/B/A/B, to dramatic monologues – yet the ones I liked the most create their own forms. Subject-wise, as the book’s title suggests, Smith is very good, cold and clear on parenting, love, and regret. ‘Object Permanence’ masterfully inhabits the perspective of a baby being put to bed (I don’t recommend it for new parents), unable to understand that the night isn’t a kind of non-existence, and dragged

Upstairs into the reeling hall that slides
With horrifying slowness to that room
Peopled with deaf-mute mammals on all sides,
Dim as the womb…

Form works with meaning, pushing us into ‘the dark, which, closing with a latch, / Becomes complete’. The final stanza is hard to parse at first – Smith effectively sacrifices the penultimate line to the final one, but I think it’s worth it. In four syllables, the whole ordeal is repeated, yet also redeemed:

No one can hear, but you cry anyway
For more time in the world you hardly knew,
Here in the body one momentous day
We loved as you.

JBW

1. I am told there is a lot of discussion on the internet at the moment about so-called ‘performative reading’. All I can say is that reading on the tube in London is normal and no one seems to be performing. We are all too tired. Still, here is a true story: a few weeks ago, I was on the way to work, reading a book, when a large, well-built man in a high-vis vest sat next to me, carrying a huge satchel. “I see I’m in the reading zone”, he said (the woman opposite us was reading too), which is exactly what you don’t say when you’re in the reading zone, before proceeding to retrieve his own book - I think it was Colleen Hoover, or something like that - out of the bag. So, we sat there reading, in the reading zone. At the next stop, a young woman got on and sat on the other side of him. They quickly struck up a conversation about the book he was reading, which she’d read too. As they were talking, he got four or five more books out of his bag to show to her: mostly romantic fiction, one that looked like self-help (by this point I had stopped reading). They seemed to get on. He asked her where she worked - a local department store - and said he would bring his daughter along to see her there one day. Once she’d left, he asked me if I was enjoying my book (Blood April by Ismail Kadare) and I showed him the cover. “It’s about blood feuds in Albania,” I said, by way of explanation (Kadare is a genius, but I enjoyed this one the least of all his books I’ve read, though I didn’t say this to the man) before mumbling something about how different it all was to my own life, clearly worried that the whole carriage now thought that I was obsessed with violence. “That’s why we read, isn’t it,” he said, “for the escape.”

2. See here to decode initials.

3. Peforming the poem also made me doubt the (little) reservation I express about the penultimate line in the piece above. How many critics read the books they’re reviewing out loud? Perhaps they should. Then again, I often change my mind about a book once I’ve written about it, for all kinds of reasons, though rarely so quickly. I think this is normal. (What’s not normal is the way in which the internet preserves everything we write in aspic.) We don’t know what we think until we put it into words, and once it’s in words, we’re free to think again.