Overview

"A collection of short lyrics, imitations, and dramatic monologues, Midlife contains the best poems Matthew Buckley Smith has written in the nine years since his debut collection. Though the poems in Midlife are not limited to any single project, many touch on recurrent themes, among these the trials of childrearing and marriage, the ever-present shadow of what Larkin calls ""Extinction's alp,"" and the anxious search for meaning that so often attends middle age. As suggested by the epigraph, this is a book that treats with compassion the paradoxical longing that so many of us share with Flaubert's heroine, namely ""to die, and also to live in Paris."""

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9781939574381

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"The strongest poems in Matthew Buckley Smith's Midlife - ""The Year of,"" ""Egg and Dart,"" ""Another Achilles,"" ""Ankou"" - attain a particular kind of perfection, long unsought, but no less a perfection for that, being both immediate and unencompassable. The latter three of the four poems I mentioned are mid-length blank verse monologues, and are the best examples of that somehow especially American form that I've read in years. --Shane McCrae Matthew Smith's Midlife is written from that stage of existence, and yet its wisdom radiates from a poet who seems to understand humanity at every age. Some of the best poems I've read about fatherhood grace this volume, which balances the weight of longer dramatic monologues and meditations with small lyrics, gemlike in their hard beauty. Smith does it all with formal mastery and generous-hearted wit. I loved this book. --Mary Jo Salter Midlife is a book about the unsettling complexities and longings of a settled life, a book suffused with complicated sentiment and insight born not only of loss and disappointment but also of the unexpected joys of durable intimacy. In dramatic monologues and lyrics, in lines that feel both chiseled and improvised, Matthew Smith explores without frills or fakery the vicissitudes of attachment in an uncertain and unstable world. What Virginia Woolf said of George Eliot's Middlemarch could be said of Midlife: it is a book for adults. --Alan Shapiro I absolutely love this book. Its dramatic voices are especially close to my heart, but the lyrics knock my socks off as well. It's a deeply impressive collection. --David Yezzi"

Author Information

Matthew Buckley Smith is the author of Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse, 2012). His poems have been featured in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Poetry Daily. He hosts the poetry podcast SLEERICKETS and lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters.

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