Zara Raab

A Review of Matthew Buckley Smith, Midlife.  Measure Press, 2023

Aptly enough, given the title and author, many short poems in Midlife are the reflections of a white American male in midlife, but the collection also saliently and movingly probes the decay of America’s own midlife: America past her prime, still vaguely hopeful, but too often seized by mistrust and dread. Old hippies salving their damaged psyches with evangelical proselytizing. White-collar men, used to thinking of themselves as kings or warriors, some devolving to delusional charades of domestic violence, others reconciling themselves to ordinary domestic life with only occasional glimpses of what might have been, i.e., Achilles in a brief, other world encounter with Odysseus. Men and women still puzzling out how they might live companionably together. All of us in dread of COVID or some new plague or environmental disaster.

Smith’s blank verse narratives form a brilliant structural underpinning for the accompanying short lyrics, many of which gain in resonance by the imagery and narrative detail of the longer narratives. At the center of the medieval fable “Ankou,” a mother daily searches “The loins and armpits” of her “little ones” for “fear of plague.” Her fear goes back to her grandmother’s tales of how, “One day in spring, when she was yet so young,” she met Ankou—the mythological figure of death—in the woods, and how

           Within a fortnight, half the town was dead.

By setting the tale in another time and place, Smith amplifies its power, and confirms our fear that the recent pandemic will be by no means the last in human memory.

          All is not well.

          Beneath the shouts of vendors in the street,

          He that hath ears may hear a different call,

          A reedy tuneless keening on the wind,

          That swells and fades and never disappears.

But just as saliently, the imagery of “Ankou” resonates throughout Midlife, particularly in poems like “Lullaby Before Birth” and “Object Permanence,” addressing the fears of parents and their young children. It takes Smith, in the latter poem, no fewer than five quatrains to deliver a child upstairs to bed. All the world’s a stage for this poet, including the “reeling hall” that parent and child must travel to get to the nursery, “a room

          Peopled with deaf-mute mammals on all sides,

          Dim as the womb

and put her to bed, all the while singing “the same / Unmeaning sounds.” Parents reassure their young of the object’s permanence. As adults we know objects have none—something small children already “know,” having left the womb and daily going motherless to sleep in the dark. But the delectable details and manner of telling entertain and enlighten, and perhaps align Smith, with his background in theater as both actor and playwright, more closely to Shakespeare than to Frost.

Nowhere does Smith’s background in theater come so delightfully alive as in the poem “Elizabethan,” written for “E,” a pun on a child’s name, a dad’s way of heralding his child as princess of the realm. The house where she will live—with

          all the grounds and evergreens without

          the mortgaged walls I sing to you within

has already been transformed by her birth into something resembling a royal palace. This is not a parent hobnobbing in the park with the other moms (or stay-at-home dads) about his infant daughter, her beauty, her Apgar score. This is a dad whose peers are poets he invites to his podcast SLEERICKETS, poets he interviews or whose books he reviews, poets he went to school with. The poem’s originality stems in part from this fresh context. And so the poem begins, 

          This winter, your first and only without English,

          Without memories or means yet to remember,

          The world looks small which you’ll discover endless

          Between tonight and this time next December.

          As every intervening day convinces

          Your tongue to love this language of the dead,

          Impressive terms pronounced by Norman princes,

          Along with stuff the Saxon forebears said.

With an exuberance this poet knows to leaven, need be, with darker stuff, he exalts in bequeathing to his infant daughter the English language and all that it contains, all that has been written in it over the centuries. By virtue of this "language of the dead," his daughter will be crowned in this life. The couplet of this Shakespearean sonnet provides the inevitable turn to something more sober, a doubt, echoing Shakespeare the sonneteer, that this poet's lines will "live long enough to bring you pleasure."

“Lullaby Before Birth,” set in the nursery and in three three-beat stanzas, cleverly reprises Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” though perhaps without reaching Frost’s gravitas. Addressing the infant in the final stanza, in utero, Smith sings,

          So stay a little longer

          Where morning isn’t yet

          And nothing is too late,

          And all the rest will keep.

          We grow, but never younger,

          And have not time to sleep.

The resonance I have mentioned between long narrative poem and short lyrics gives Midlife a remarkable coherence as a portrait both of the artist and of his time. The short lyric “Lenox Square,” for example, recalls the poet’s youth, when he and a college friend worked as clerks in an upscale clothing store,

          I learned to fold a dress shirt and to dress

          Like you, expensively, slightly askew.

In dressing themselves better than they ever will again and ditching “early for a slice / At the midtown patio with dollar pours,” the poet and his friend engage in a bit of comic nostalgia that is also just good storytelling, with a piquant address to his friend—and by extension to us, his readers, at the end.  

          We both have better jobs now, and worse clothes,

          And others to ask for love. Ask yours. It’s late,

          And time to close.

“Lenox Square,” read on its own, may seem like a slight poem, a poem of little consequence, but read with Smith’s long narrative “Another Achilles,” it is a vivid portrait of the poet as a young man—and a clever rendering of manhood in early twenty-first century America. The Achilles of Smith’s narrative chooses—or his mother chooses for him—an ordinary life on an unremarkable island, Skyros, rather than setting sail for Troy, as his great father bids. The heroic ideal he rejects is one that tarnishes mightily in the 20^th Century: the grandsons of the “Great Generation” of WWII might indeed have a lark, temping in trendy clothing stores, and not think too much about it. In “Lenox Square,” the poet not only spurns heroism, but, unlike the “other” Achilles, he takes a certain gleeful pleasure in ordinary life. He does not wake in the night from a dream of that other, more heroic life, and say, “And once again I’m nothing but myself.” He seems to know and feel that he is ever himself, if delightfully, self-mockingly so, and he goes home to talk to his wife and enjoy the company of his small daughters.

The theme of gender roles, and more deeply, of social status and hierarchy in a complex world is one Smith explores in an extraordinary way in another of his pillar narratives, the long poem “Egg and Dart.” Set in late medieval times, perhaps in Renaissance Italy, the poem is voiced by an apprentice artisan in a master stone mason’s studio. The apprentice is “the one that makes the egg-and-dart,”

          the trim on certain walls and columns,

          sometimes around the edge of a relief. . .

          . . .

          The excellence of which is not being seen.

Are the Egg and Dart “meant to signify / The figures of a Woman and a Man” as his master jests on occasion? The apprentice artisan’s obsession with perfecting his work and his own exploration of its meaning are an unforgettable tour de force.

It may help the reader to know that many of this poet’s experiences are grounded in his role as primary caretaker of two small girls and husband to a highly accomplished professional woman (ever the bread winner)—a mode of life reflecting the apprentice artisan’s in its call for attention to the details of hands-on parenting and for a deep willingness to serve, where service is love. These are not, one feels, qualities necessarily demanded of the master stone mason, nor Achilles, even on Skyros.  They may, though, be demanded of poets, like Smith, committed to deepening his grasp of world literature and to meeting the metrical demands of canonical verse.

In his youth, beleaguered by challenges as all youths are, and drawn to the theater, to acting and drama, as well as to certain friendships and loves, this poet seems to have lived these experiences not as a solitary sensitive teen or aging, moody intellectual, but gregariously, talking his way through each challenge with classmates, peers, and later his wife—and by engaging with philosophers ancient and modern, living and dead. Smith’s cohorts—judging from his successful and highly recommended podcast—are writers, mostly poets, of widely varying ilk and locale, who meet with him not at faculty lounge, but on SLEERICKETS. In a striking way, many a poem included here, although read entirely as the work of one able poet, issues in an unstudied way from a gregarious and lively ongoing conversation, multifaceted in its consideration of various points of view, with the writers, family, and friends who make up his world. Smith’s is, loosely defined, a collaborative method of composition worth commendation in an era when we all, or a lot of us, spend too much time talking to ourselves.

Matthew Buckley Smith is a master storyteller. Midlife’s five long, blank verse poems brilliantly narrate aspects of our historical moment: the turn to evangelical religion, the puzzle of gender relations, the absence of heroism in a time of retreat on the world stage, rampant bouts of psychopathology in the population, and, of course, the arrival of the Covid pandemic in 2020. He writes with striking sensitivity to the nuances of English and to the metrical and formal demands of verse. The impetus and pulse of the poetry is never merely formal or linguistic, but originate, I hazard, in a direct experience and engagement with life—sensory, sensuous, emotional, intellectual. In Midlife, he seems to seek to bridge the unbridgeable gap between experience and language, and in so seeking he accomplishes small miracles I rarely come across in reading my contemporaries.

Zara Raab is a member of the Powow River Poets. She also helps organize the Poetry Day of the Newburyport Literary Festival. Originally from the West Coast, she has settled north of Boston to be closer to children and to participate in Essex County's vital poetry community. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, New Verse News, Verse Daily, The Dark Horse, and elsewhere. Recently published is a revised and expanded edition of her first collection Swimming the Eel, which includes the text of Fracas & Asylum.