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
