Lamp of the Body

by Maggie Smith

In Lamp of the Body, Maggie Smith illuminates nothing less than the opportunities for and the possibilities of poetic utterance. Her themes—landscape, loss, and western myth—are richly classic; her language, sensuous and elegant. Primitive and visionary, exacting and unrestrained, these poems are in possession of a good strangeness, an awful nostalgia that irrevocably transforms the now. --Kathy Fagan

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster 2020); Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press 2015), winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks.

Smith's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, Image, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, AGNI, Guernica, Brevity, the Washington Post, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. In April 2017 the poem was featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary.

A 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Maggie Smith works as freelance writer and editor. She is an Editor at Large at the Kenyon Review and is also on the faculty of Spalding University's low-residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Julianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again Maggie Smith gets it like no one else

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can childhood get any creepier? Smith says, "Yes!" These poems are simultaneously tough AND beautiful. The gaze is unflinching. Reminds me of Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" for all the right reasons. Excellent!

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, marvelous collection of poems.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyric and haunting. One of my favorite books.

[Rolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read this after reading (and loving) some of Smith’s later poetry collections and her memoir. I was surprised to see so many biblically-themed poems, but they were lovely and not necessarily religious in their implications, so even this crusty atheist didn’t mind.

Favorites from this collection included “The Poem Speaks to Memory,” “Country Warnings,” “The Poem Speaks to Danger,” “Self Portrait: Three Canvases,” “The Poem Speaks to Danger,” “The Wife of Lot,” “Charleston Green,” “Singular,” “The Poem Speaks to Progress,” and “Cana.”

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith tackles some important themes in this collection through sparse, poignant, and sometimes cryptic imagery. I enjoyed all of her beautiful poems, even those that remained somewhat inscrutable to me.

[Heather Gibbons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some gorgeous poems in here-- a very talented young poet. I'm eager to read her more recent work.