10 of the Best Maggie Smith Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The American poet Maggie Smith (born 1977) has become one of the most popular and most widely read contemporary poets, thanks to her poetry being shared on social media and elsewhere online. Her easy, conversational mode of address makes us feel as if we are being ushered into her confidence, but this colloquial style masks the artfulness of Smith’s verse, which is highly controlled and structured.

Like the poetry of Mary Oliver, another poet whose work is affirmative and uplifting without shying away from the darker aspects of the modern world, Maggie Smith has been encountered and enjoyed by many readers who might otherwise not choose to pick up a poetry book.

With that in mind, what are Maggie Smith’s best poems, beyond those which have ‘gone viral’ online in recent years? Below, we select and introduce ten of our favourites.

1. ‘How Dark the Beginning’.

In this 2020 poem, Smith notes how ‘light’ is synonymous with ‘goodness’ in the popular imagination and in film (indeed, poetry too, we might add). Instead, she wants to focus on the ‘good dark’ that accompanies the true beginning of the day, before sunrise, when dawn first breaks.

‘Let there be light’? If the darkest hour really is before the dawn, then that dark may not necessarily be something to fear – nor should the light be something we inherently trust.

2. ‘First Fall’.

The title of this 2017 poem refers to Smith’s experience showing her young child their first autumn. It’s another Maggie Smith poem that takes place at early dawn: that time when the stars are still out (just about) as the sun begins to rise over the horizon.

She points out the sycamores, telling her child the name by which the trees go by, and invites her young child to attend to the crisp sounds of the leaves. Smith is aware that this is also her child’s first experience of things dying, unaware that they will grow back the following year.

3. ‘Parachute’.

Beautiful things, Smith asserts in this touching poem, remind us of ‘the world’s wholeness’. In this poem, another poem about her relationship with her children, Smith considers those white lies we tell our children to protect them from the ugly tragedies of the real world.

So a baby which was strapped to its mother’s chest as she threw herself in despair out of an eighth-story window, in the speaker’s reassuring retelling of this horrible event to her daughter, miraculously lives; the man on fire which her daughter saw a video of during a school trip can somehow be unharmed through the speaker’s uplifting words to her child.

4. ‘What I Carried’.

Like Smith’s best-known poem ‘Good Bones’ (which we’ll come to shortly), ‘What I Carried’ reflects the poet’s fears for her children and the world they are growing up in. We often talk about ‘living with our fear’ as if it’s a real person or creature, and this poem takes this idea and makes beautiful poetry out of that daily struggle with the unknown, or half-known.

Through successive stanzas which begin with the same line, ‘I carried my fear of the world’, she explores the complex relationship she has with this fear, which she makes into a living, breathing thing.

5. ‘Twentieth Century’.

This 2017 poem is likely to strike a chord with virtually anyone who grew up or came of age at the end of the twentieth century, especially if they view the previous century as a simpler time.

The poem keeps any irrational nostalgia for that simpler, earlier century at arm’s length with its witty apostrophe (addressing a century as if it were a person who might reach across the years and answer) and its attention to detail: the windows of rooms with lights on ‘painting yellow Rothkos on the water’, for instance.

6. ‘Joke’.

A poem which might be read in dialogue with ‘Twentieth Century’ above, ‘Joke’ is another poem about having a dialogue with the past, but mediated through the idea of dreams (unreliable, yet often somehow truer than what our conscious selves detect) and Heraclitus’ famous statement that we cannot step into the same river twice (which Smith’s speaker here misremembers, offhand, as a ‘joke’).

7. ‘Voting-Machine’.

Co-commissioned in 2019 as part of Project 19 – an initiative celebrating the centenary of the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the vote in the US – this poem is prefaced by a quotation from David Kindy which provides useful context:

In 1899, Lenna R. Winslow of Columbus, Ohio, applied for a patent for a ‘Voting-Machine.’ He had created a mechanical system that adjusted the ballot the voter would see based on whether that voter was a man or a woman.

Maggie Smith’s poem uses this voting-machine motif to explore the long fight for, and securing of, equal voting rights for women, with the click and turn of the machine cleverly hinting at the societal change which occurred to make female suffrage a reality.

8. ‘Threshold’.

Here’s a short lyric about doorways as true thresholds, dividing but also joining two different states, areas, or worlds. Addressing the reader directly using the second-person pronoun ‘you’, Smith explores the human desire to be both ‘here / and there’, ‘now and then’, simultaneously.

9. ‘Where Honey Comes From’.

This poem is worth reading for Smith’s arresting metaphor for a beehive as a ‘forbidden lantern / lit on the inside’ alone. The poem combines two of Smith’s recurring themes: ‘sweetness and fear’, as the poem puts it.

10. ‘Good Bones’.

This poem is surely Maggie Smith’s best-known. First published in 2016, ‘Good Bones’ embodies many of the qualities, and addresses many of the themes, which we find in Smith’s poetry more widely.

It’s a poem about how we keep the realities of the world from our children, seeking to protect them from the harsh truths – that life is short, for example – which they are too young to be burdened with.

Asserting that the world is ‘at least / fifty percent terrible’, Smith tells us that she keeps this, too, from her children. The poem’s title is about the way realtors or estate agents talk about unpromising properties containing ‘good bones’, or the potential for improvement – so, too, could the world be improved if we only tried …