Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Good Bones by Maggie Smith Hannah Warren Maggie Smith. Good Bones. Tupelo Press, 2017. Maggie Smith exploits language. She learns it, she masters it, and she manipulates it. In her new poetry compilation Good Bones, named aptly after Smith’s 2016 single poem which Public Radio International called “the official poem of 2016,” Maggie Smith explores what it means to be a mother in a world that is constantly changing. She provides brief glimpses into the everyday life of a mother, showing the successful moments alongside the unsuccessful, allowing readers to connect easily and quickly. Smith’s entire book reads with a serious, mystical tone, reminiscent of her last collection, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison. Though she does not focus on the modern fairytale or the reinvented myth in Good Bones, she maintains a note of the unlikely, the inner fears of human experience, the supernatural tugging of everyday life, and a glimpse into worlds that are not our own, but neither are they fully removed. Throughout the collection, Maggie Smith includes various small pieces of stories, leaving bread-crumbs for readers to pick up as they follow along. Most of the poems focus on the fears and struggles and fallibility of motherhood: Still I felt nothing could harm me—nothing would dare. I was essential. I was too needed in the world. Smith defines what it means for a mother to feel indestructible near children who are so irreversibly destructible in comparison. This construct of power shifts throughout the collection to represent a mother’s body as both a force, a powerful undercurrent, and a limited animation. In all this, Smith’s poems [End Page 62] praise the virtues of humanity while explaining the downfalls. She suggests comfort, kindness, and sincere empathy as methods to create a better world. Pieces of the narrative focus on a daughter who presents infinite questions to her mother over the span of the collection: “Why is the sky so tall and over everything?,” “What is the past?,” and “What is the future?” Smith uses these moments to focus on the surreal and the existential, especially with the daughter’s question, “How do leaves fall off the trees and how did God build this car?” Within this poem and others, Smith explores religious dialogue and how mothers must present beliefs or non-beliefs to their children, while also wondering where children acquire new information. Who taught the daughter about God, if not her mother? Smith writes, “Someone must have told you / what God made without telling you everything / doesn’t mean everything.” Struggling to answer her daughter’s question, the mother presents a multitude of answers, all of which either build upon or disagree with the previous answer. Part of what makes Good Bones a success is the small family that lives within the pages and within the wilderness. Poems throughout the collection depict a woman, a girl, and a man. The woman and girl stay behind in their home, while the man has “gone over the mountain.” This grouping pops up every few pages, bringing new information to the narrative, always reminding the reader that the girl is unique in that she “has an eye like a spyglass for birds. / She must be marked, the woman thinks. Wherever she walks, the shadow of a hawk / falls on her.” This storyline in verse depicts the child as she grows and the hawk that tethers to her, keeping her wild and giving her a new shadow that acts as a comfort and a reminder of who she is. Their narrative is one of change and survival, despite the wilderness that surrounds them. Here, Smith combines protection with parenthood: the hawk uses the girl’s hair for its nest, the woman watches over the girl as she grows, and the man fears that the girl will have changed before he returns from beyond the mountain. Maggie Smith intersperses these snippets with pieces of intimate and familiar learning. This book describes the narrator’s home and the good and bad things that come along with knowing a town so well that nothing is surprising, yet, at times, you’re stunned to recall what...