Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod is a beautiful mess. Smith is the author of Keep Moving, a grief diary characterized by its spare one-day-at-a-time, one-sentence-a-day format. But for those readers who enjoyed the relentless minimalism of Keep Moving (I was one such reader and wrote about it here), Goldenrod offers more in terms of sheer material, but fails to deliver its abundance consistently. Smith does better when she gives herself less to work with.
Grief creates a kind of gravity, a kind of gravitas. The underlying grief of divorce that motivated Keep Moving gave it its lyrical gravity and power. But Goldenrod lacks such internal intensity. The center cannot hold.
When we were all locked away during COVID-19 nurturing our sourdough starters, Maggie Smith did the same thing, and came up with a poem called “Prove” to prove it. The act of writing is compared to letting dough rise, but the metaphor is forced enough to be comic rather than serious. Either way, I’m not sure the dough has risen in Goldenrod.
I try to approach reading new books of poetry by established poets in the same way I imagine the established poets assess unpublished poets in first book contests. That is to say, I like to give established poets the same amount of patience they give manuscrpts in the slush pile. The poetry manuscript contest format doesn’t encourage charitable reading. After all, when you have 800 manuscripts to eliminate, it’s easier to think about why something doesn’t work than why it does.
I don’t know about what another editor would say, but Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod would have gotten rejected if it were in my slush pile.
Her poetry feels less like lyric and more like resignation. Whether she’s writing about police brutality, mass shootings, or child separation at the border, Smith has nothing new to bring to the conversation except lament.
In the opening poem in the collection, Smith refuses to name North American birds by their birdsong, though she claims to have tried to memorize them. At first I found her resistance to the tendency in American poetry to name every bird in existence interesting. Lyric poets like Mary Oliver have an almost taxonomical obsession with naming birds and flowers, and yet the tendency fails to do much for the poetry. Smith makes clear early on that she is no such poet. The second poem in the book echoes the same theme. “I’m no botanist,” Smith declares. “If you’re the color of sulfur / and growing at the roadside, you’re goldenrod. / You don’t care what I call you, whatever.” There’s a delicious defiance in this refusal to call a thing by its name, particularly in a poet. And yet, the refusal serves no purpose.
In the time of climate change, can the refusal to name an animal or plant even be considered heroic or praiseworthy? For example, in Hawai’i, the kiwikiu is a critically endangered species. It has a distinctive song. I have never heard a kiwikiu in the wild. And yet, a researcher knew its song and was able to identify it, and in doing so, was able to show that at least one bird still lived on the slopes of Haleakala. And this might not matter to you, but it matters in Hawai’i, where many native animals and plants are under critical threat of extinction.
As more species of birds and other animals go extinct due to habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, and climate change, I often wonder if we truly feel these losses given how little we see in nature that is ours. In order to feel the loss of something, you must first know it.
In this context, Maggie Smith’s refusal to know the names of the birds doesn’t feel honorable or noble. There’s no point to her not knowing, just plain old American distraction and distractibility. Smith’s poem about goldenrods ends with the poet looking at herself in the mirror. And just like that, we’re back to Narcissus, but to no greater end. Smith isn’t even true to her own denial, naming birds and plants specifically in other poems later.
And then, just as suddenly, Smith drops that thread to write about “the president” calling “undocumented immigrants animals.” What follows is terrible poetry. Child separation is likened to a predatory bird eating a roosting bird’s egg. In one of the most maudlin lines in the book, we are asked to consider the instinct of the mother bird who returns from hunting and continues to sit on a broken egg. Nothing in this poetry suggests that Smith has had any personal experience with deportation, child separation, or even has known someone who is a refugee. I wouldn’t go as far as to call this poetry exploitative, but there’s the uneasy feeling of watching a bystander trying to put herself too much in the center of the action here.
The poet moves on. “The sun comes up, and soon / the you-know-what will hit the you-know-what.”
How many worthy books of poetry sit in slush piles right now that will never be published, that have more lyrical, linguistic, and poetic sense than all this?
For all Smith’s early refusal to call nature nature by its multiplicity of names, she sure relies on it quite a bit to get her point across. She even has the requisite poem about starlings. And like almost every modern and contemporary poet these days, her oeuvre wouldn’t be complete without a poem called “Walking the Dog,” which is entirely forgettable. Howard Nemerov and Matthew Dickman also have poems about walking dogs, but theirs are much better, and can be read if you follow the links.
The thing about poetry, and there is a thing about poetry, is that it is not ours once it has been written. Once a poem it out there, it belongs to everyone else.
As Smith herself writes: “Isn’t that what you’ve been taught—nothing is ours?” And yet, for a poem to belong to everyone, it must first belong to the poet who writes it. I don’t think these poems ever belonged to Smith. If you understand what I’m saying when I say this, you understand something intrinsic about poetry, about writing, and about the importance of personal risk in any creative endevour.
When Smith has something to say about distant things, the poems fall flat. Stones are yoked to violence through the conduit of them both being “teachers.” But the precision of the extended metaphor is hazy at best.
There are some better moments in the book. The second movement contains a series of poems about motherhood that explore the concept of birth and death and the unknowability of the self.
But even this intimate series of poems is broken by the news. An unfortunate poem that juxtaposes her son’s safety to that of men shot in the streets is followed by an even more unfortunate poem where babies are caged and crying in Spanish. Another poem compares a child living in a transitional neighborhood to a weed. Smith shows understanding of neither perennials nor children living in low income neighborhoods, nor any evidence she has had close interactions with either. She would do well to read up on regenerative agriculture and maybe volunteer.
And that’s why Smith’s book made me so angry. It made me angry because the poetry itself became a form of activism, which replaced actual action. For all the time Smith spends not identifying the plants she writes about, there’s nothing in the work to suggest that Smith spends any significant amount of time around plants, or that she went to a single protest against gun violence, or that she took the time to personally help or contribute to even one child she writes about crying in a cage or living in a transitional neighborhood. It’s easy to get commiseration with a poem written at the comfort of your desk, much harder to live through the solutions.
Smith is at her worst when trying to make sense of the news in her poetry, and at her best when she permits her imagery and syntax to unfold the meaning of small personal griefs and fears without exerting too much conscious control over the material. She is at her best when she writes about motherhood and her divorce. In “Not Everything is a Poem,” she writes hauntingly and beautifully about her son’s sickness. Smith is superb when she keeps it close to home. Aren’t we all?
Smith notes that she tells herself “a story about my life, / a story I call “Talisman,” a story / that might end well if I tell it right.” There’s something moving here about the knowledge that a life well lived is well lived because it’s a good story, even if it’s a story only told to the self.
A good story is a series of small details that resonate.
The poems Smith writes after her divorce, are also small, but wonderful.
“Poem Beginning with a Line from Basho” took my breath away. Given world enough and time, I imagine Smith could write a stunning book about single motherhood and the desire to return to the golden age of a broken marriage. Goldenrod, though, is no such book.
There are also exceptions to the terrible political poems. Just when I was about to give up on Goldenrod entirely, I read the poem “Small Shoes,” a poem about the refugee crisis and about light pollution, but also just a simple poem about looking up at the stars.
Perhaps this is why I was most disappointed in Goldenrod. Smith knows how to write poetry. She just didn’t do much of it in this book.
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About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.