Maggie Smith’s “You Could Make This Place Beautiful”
nce, the poets bound us. With their forceful stories and forthright charm, the Fireside Poets sewed a severed society together with rhyme and myth. Nineteenth Century families huddled in candlelight, united through civil war by the entrancing verses of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” or Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus.” Before telegrams or radio, before screens and scrolls, poetry pioneered virality. Once, poetry was pop culture.
Exactly 150 years after Whittier published “Snow-Bound,” Maggie Smith loosed her mere 17 lines upon the world. Her poem “Good Bones” became a talisman in a season of tragedy upon tragedy, a salve for a nation riven by violence, where the audacity of hope risked its total abdication. Smith’s marvel of form—her seeming simplicity masking her sonic sophistication—dropped a charge into our national waters, sounding our depths, reminding us of the irrepressible irrationality of imagining a better tomorrow.
Prophets and poets, as Smith certainly knows, over-index toward suffering. Truth-telling has its costs. As her poem traversed space and time, giving life and language to aching and adoring multitudes, her marriage was dying. Seven years later, she brings us a document of its decline, its title taken from the final line of her viral poem. She offers her story as neither eulogization nor lamentation, neither investigation nor accusation. Rather, she offers it as any accomplished poet would: as material.
“Love is a kind of literature,” wrote Anatole Broyard. So is–maybe more so–love’s ending. “It is stunning, it is a moment like no other, / when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore,” writes Ann Carson. Upon that moment, and the bruising moments that follow, a literature of divorce has been constructed. The respective bookshelf is full—of novels (Katie Kitamura’s A Separation), memoirs (Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath), self-help scripts (Debbie Ford’s Spiritual Divorce). The shelf is elastic: Peruse the catalogs of major publishers, and one is certain to spot a new addition to the genre every season.
You’d be forgiven if you shelved Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful alongside them. An easy miscue. If they’re any good, poets stop short of the inscrutable. And Smith has her misdirections at the ready. Her narrative is fragmented. Her timeline loops. Scenes triumph over chronology. On one page, she’s as insistent as late afternoon hunger. On another, she’s drifting and distant as a dream.
The effect is exactly as intended. For anyone who has experienced the dissolution of a family, the fractal nature of Smith’s book is home turf. Fond memories collide with future anxieties. Self-flagellation competes with fantasies of revenge. Fierce loyalty embraces endless adaptability. Swimming between such polarities, Smith freestyles. Sometimes she is a vulnerable guide, in search of her own self-deceptions and self-actualization. Sometimes she is a fearless truth-seeker, excavating the subterranean constructs of gender and power that formed the sandy foundations of her marriage. At all times she is a writer of extraordinary imagination, bringing all the force of her craft—the flaring motifs and abundance of metaphors, the meta-cognitive gestures, the fantastical diversions and sparkling images, the melting tenderness of childhood moments—to bear on one of the most excruciating experiences a human can endure.
A handful of her poems make cameos. “Good Bones” of course. And “Bride.” These moments deliver a kind of relief. From the ongoing trauma and fresh tragedies, from the feelings of alienation and abandonment. Smith’s poems function in this memoir just as they have in her life, and in ours: fragments shored against our ruin, jewels cut from collapse.
