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The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison
Delving into the depths of fairy tales to transform the daily into encounters with the marvelous but dangerous, Maggie Smith’s poems question whether the realms of imagination and story can possibly be safe. Even as her compressed stories are unfolding on a suburban cul de sac, they are deep in the mythical woods, “where children, despite their commonness, / are a delicacy.”
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2015
6 people are currently reading
1046 people want to read
About the author
Maggie Smith
19 books1,948 followersMaggie 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
September 24, 2015
These poems draw from the dark waters of fairy and folk tales to produce a quiet-but-startling lyric intensity that held me from the first page. Smith's poems capture the darkness of childhood worlds, real and imagined--from the Grimms' Black Forest to the "dial tone" songs of Ohio--in ways that keep turning and surprising the reader, in spite of the hauntingly familiar mythic forces that underlie each line. The images are rich and resonant, and the reader's ear is always rewarded. A stunning read.
April 6, 2015
Natural. Dark. Haunting. As if all the generations beneath our feet seeped up through the soil to weave into the unseen spaces between us all.
July 12, 2019
I have followed Maggie Smith on twitter for at least a year and I have read her most recent collection Good Bones, which is very nature based. The Well, although it includes nature and nature imagery & symbolism, is much darker. The collection is a twist, a reimagining of the fable/fairy tale genre, but the Grimm Brothers tales and not the Disney ones. The poems are very accessible and would be interesting to really analyze in terms of the fable/fairy tale genre. I’m just having a difficult time with the juxtaposition of public persona of Maggie Smith and poet who wrote these poems. It’s a bit like the people of Jefferson, MS finding out that Miss Emily Grierson not only murdered Homer Bailey but also slept next to his corpse.
July 7, 2015
Maggie Smith’s new collection looms rich in terrible “grim” fairy tales, told with a hint of the child’s voice but very much adult in theme and honesty. Veils slip aside briefly to suggest ancient myths and stories told over the eons to try to help us understand the falling of stars and dying of everything we love or touch. Wolves and birds are mythic beings. The forest invades our nightmares and day dreams. The common lurches into the eerie and back again.
The commonplace weirds into the uncommon: “The seatbelt buckle branded/its open mouth into your wait.” Nature dreams itself into our daylight: “Wrens pinned like brooches/to the trees, singing, their eyes glass beads.” Always, death lurks in the eyes of the forest and in the inanimate briefly animated: “When the stone/healed behind you, it sounded like a lid closing over a tomb.”
Smith identifies with other beings, becoming the other, allowing the other to enter into herself: “I began as one cricket singing/one song. Soon we were all singing,” and contemplates the self-consciousness that removes her from the whole as well as the inevitable silence from the chorus of the living:
The sound/of me missing might be clearer
than my song. I could gift it to the night,
which misses its dear, departed silences.
Or finally:
“One night the cricket finished boring
through the air to me. But before I could see him,
the trees went dark and took me with them.
I had not been familiar with Maggie Smith’s writing, but I will certainly look forward to reading more of her poetry. This collection of adult fairy tales courageously faces life and its end with simple eloquence and even a touch of wicked charm.
The commonplace weirds into the uncommon: “The seatbelt buckle branded/its open mouth into your wait.” Nature dreams itself into our daylight: “Wrens pinned like brooches/to the trees, singing, their eyes glass beads.” Always, death lurks in the eyes of the forest and in the inanimate briefly animated: “When the stone/healed behind you, it sounded like a lid closing over a tomb.”
Smith identifies with other beings, becoming the other, allowing the other to enter into herself: “I began as one cricket singing/one song. Soon we were all singing,” and contemplates the self-consciousness that removes her from the whole as well as the inevitable silence from the chorus of the living:
The sound/of me missing might be clearer
than my song. I could gift it to the night,
which misses its dear, departed silences.
Or finally:
“One night the cricket finished boring
through the air to me. But before I could see him,
the trees went dark and took me with them.
I had not been familiar with Maggie Smith’s writing, but I will certainly look forward to reading more of her poetry. This collection of adult fairy tales courageously faces life and its end with simple eloquence and even a touch of wicked charm.
August 31, 2021
This was just disappointing. The poems were super over written to the point where sometimes I could't figure out what they were trying to say (and didn't feel very motivated to spend the time figuring it out). There were a few good ones here and there, but overall not a great use of my time. At least it was short.
April 21, 2015
What a delightful, magical poetry collection, filled with fairy tales you almost recognize and children you want so badly to save and language that explodes outward in every direction. Enchanting and scary and gripping from the first to the very last poem.
July 7, 2015
Maggie Smith's latest poetry collection is an anthology of fairy tales: sometimes, she retells traditional fairy tales (in all their violent glory) and sometimes she uses elements of fairy tales to capture contemporary stories, especially narratives of childhood. A beautiful and haunting read!
June 7, 2016
A lovely collection of poems tinged with magic realism and fairy tales, and the occasionally disturbing glimpse of suburban darkness.
The stories say the banished dead are wild now
crouching among scrawny trees, skinning rabbits
and raising them like lanterns.
The stories say the banished dead are wild now
crouching among scrawny trees, skinning rabbits
and raising them like lanterns.
July 8, 2015
Fabulous take on the fairy tale form.
May 30, 2015
Smith's poems are totemic, gorgeous, and haunting. This is a collection of poems you'll return to again and again.
November 4, 2015
So, so lovely! Poetry and folklore make such a perfect pairing. And this collection is haunting in the way that I want to be haunted.
January 2, 2016
Haunting, beautiful. Feels old and new all at once.
August 20, 2022
"But I can hardly hear it over / the sparrow alarm. That must mean / it's time for something. Every morning / they tell us the same thing, but there is no one / to translate."
"apples, always apples. / If I were you, I wouldn't eat them; poison has a way / of finding its maker."
"Even a fox with blood on its muzzle / can wish on red clover and be a girl again."
"And these things will do no good in a world / where children. despite their commonness, / are a delicacy."
"Tonight, I've spared you, / but you can't be spared forever. If the moon says / you'll be picked clean, believe her. You'll feed / whatever hunts you the heart hot from your body."
"Cut me down as you did the others. It hurts, but not / as you might expect. I imagine myself a freestone fruit: / The pit clings to the flesh but breaks free easily."
"Once you cross, as you must, / you cannot go back. There is nothing / to retrieve: when the bridge catches fire, / leave it all."
"He should have run for the river, where laundresses / built bridges of cloth, snapping clean, white sheets over the / water. Instead he crawled beneath the quilts, wanting the hair / smoothed back from his forehead. It hardly hurt at all, being / swallowed."
"Not once, but always, there is a woman who cannot allow / another's happiness. She wishes a man dead and means it."
"Your heart is destined to skip / like a scratched record."
"You answer / my wren with a hawk, / my doe with a fox. The more / you change, the harder it is to / go back."
"They've flown beyond the world / of mercy and forgiveness, the human world. / They aren't girls anymore but wild, winged / creatures, their eyes black as the eyes of crows."
"But don't mistake loyalty for love; it doesn't love you-- / no more than the shadow stitched to your feet."
"apples, always apples. / If I were you, I wouldn't eat them; poison has a way / of finding its maker."
"Even a fox with blood on its muzzle / can wish on red clover and be a girl again."
"And these things will do no good in a world / where children. despite their commonness, / are a delicacy."
"Tonight, I've spared you, / but you can't be spared forever. If the moon says / you'll be picked clean, believe her. You'll feed / whatever hunts you the heart hot from your body."
"Cut me down as you did the others. It hurts, but not / as you might expect. I imagine myself a freestone fruit: / The pit clings to the flesh but breaks free easily."
"Once you cross, as you must, / you cannot go back. There is nothing / to retrieve: when the bridge catches fire, / leave it all."
"He should have run for the river, where laundresses / built bridges of cloth, snapping clean, white sheets over the / water. Instead he crawled beneath the quilts, wanting the hair / smoothed back from his forehead. It hardly hurt at all, being / swallowed."
"Not once, but always, there is a woman who cannot allow / another's happiness. She wishes a man dead and means it."
"Your heart is destined to skip / like a scratched record."
"You answer / my wren with a hawk, / my doe with a fox. The more / you change, the harder it is to / go back."
"They've flown beyond the world / of mercy and forgiveness, the human world. / They aren't girls anymore but wild, winged / creatures, their eyes black as the eyes of crows."
"But don't mistake loyalty for love; it doesn't love you-- / no more than the shadow stitched to your feet."
September 10, 2021
A rather astonishing book in many ways, reminiscent of Anne Sexton's Transformations. I didn't always follow all of the poems because of the dense mythology Smith creates (and the series of "Apologue" poems didn't do much for me), but I also love the dense repetitions and echoes that run throughout the book. I loved "Good Bones," which is a very different type of book; this one is definitely more challenging. I actually finished the book once, and immediately started reading it again--that kind of book. Astonishing but not always satisfying.
August 15, 2017
The reader warms to this book like a body in a tepid bath to which hotter water is added little by little, until slowly and without realizing it, steam rises all around and all you want to do is sink deeper into the cascade and melt of the words, bubbling and languorous, eerie, foggy, Big Bad Wolf-y, a dark, rich, immersive forest-tub of poetry from which you never want to emerge.
January 12, 2018
Beautiful collection with concentric circles of images throughout. These poems are just beyond collective memories, the dappled, cloudy, whimsical musings of our mothers, nightmares and dreams long buried, now bathed in sunlight. At times the pieces are hard to access, other times, frighteningly easy.
July 11, 2018
Simply stunning poetry with a bend towards folklore, folk tale, and myth. This collection is an example of why archetypes have lived on throughout recorded history: immortal stories and figures are at once universal and deeply personal. The reader is never quite sure if this is the poet at her most confessional or whether she is simply a gifted teller of stories.
October 11, 2019
This wonderful collection of magical poems, many inspired by folklore, took me into new worlds and (at the risk of sounding trite!) connected me with my soul. The majority of the poems were so deeply moving, they touched me on a profound level. I have followed Maggie Smith on Twitter for a while and feel very grateful to have discovered such a writer.
January 17, 2021
I loved the theme and could actually discern what the poems were about, but very few poems gave me that emotional punch I look for in poetry. The only poem that made me really feel something was, "Last Night on Earth." I love the line, "I am the remainder after loss is equated, the little R beside the zero. In darkness, I am everything one last time."
May 29, 2024
An interesting collection of poems which are much more capital-r Romantic in both tone and content than the other Smith collections I’ve read. The pieces that spoke loudest to me were those based in Smith’s own life, particularly those about her childhood. “Freedom Colony,” “Notes on Camp” and “The Shepherd’s Horn” were my favorites.
January 18, 2019
First ten or so poems had me totally captivated. The magic wears off a bit towards the middle, but Smith captures the dark magic inside all of us, borne from our childhoods, or even farther back, borne in nature
June 5, 2019
After reading this, Maggie Smith has now become one of my favorite poets. I loved Vanishing Point; Ohio; Suspension; Xenia, 1974 ; Shapeshifter; The Shepherd's Horn; If I Forget to Tell You; The Dark and I Think of You, Eréndira.
October 11, 2021
Spent my Sunday sitting with these fantastical, fairy tale-esque poems that are about loss and pain and grief and violence and the way all of that coexists with beauty and nature in ways that are impossible for all of us - adults and children alike - to puzzle out.
April 27, 2025
I really enjoyed this poetry collection it has themes of folklore and fairytales so lots of wolves and forests. The title poem is very good and I liked the poems that were threaded through with the Spanish influence. Imagery and use of language was great too.
June 30, 2017
Eerie and lovely. Maggie Smith has such a strong voice.
June 25, 2018
An absolutely stunning journey through the forest of fairy tales Maggie Smith has weaved together. Truly one of the best poetry collections that exists or will ever exist.
October 7, 2018
This is perfect!
January 29, 2019
At first glance, you get that feeling of "what have you done to my childhood" and then it sinks in and you see the world a little clearer. That's the feeling of these poems and they're wonderful.
May 16, 2020
magic.
August 31, 2021
20/31 #TheSealeyChallenge
Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews