DO I WEAR IT OR DOES IT CARRY ME? A REVIEW OF MAGGIE SMITH’S A SUIT OR A SUITCASE
by DIVYA MEHRISH
A feral sadness runs through A Suit or a Suitcase, Maggie Smith’s new collection, one with a hunger rumbling in its belly. Smith’s lyrically charged poems are containers that overflow and leak into each other, as what they hold is precisely the kind of thing that cannot remain held. The cumulative effect is less a chronicle of healing than a demonstration of how a life gets rendered into something one can attempt to carry, or a load one can try to share with others. Smith performs this work at the level of the line. The short lines and enjambments grant a moment one meaning and the next line another, offering and withdrawing a sense of relief within one breath. The reader is given a moment to believe something before the syntax revokes it, and that breathless interval is where the book does much of its thinking. Smith concentrates sounds in clusters and resists easy closure; her poems tend to end on a turn or a vulnerable admission rather than a resolution, which keeps the central questions open and uncomfortable.
One of the book’s governing questions focuses on remains. What is left when we look back? Smith’s speaker holds her life in her hands, gently, the way one might hold a vase up to the window, turning it, watching how the light strikes it from every angle, trying to determine whether the object is whole or merely intact. A vase, after all, is only a container in the presence of what it was built to hold. What is involved in the project, Smith asks, of restoring meaning to a life that has been drained of it?
Smith suggests that the body may be one instrument involved in this process. In the titular poem, the body arrives as a kind of companion: neither a vehicle nor a cage, but an entity that walks alongside the self and speaks independently. Ideas here are muscular and agentic: they do not originate in the mind and descend down through the limbs; they “are whispering in my wrists / & all along the slopes of my calves.” The poem “Rasp” pushes more forcefully, asking the reader to “Lie down / and forget your body, forgive / your body its bad cradle, / its brokenness.” The body is not neutral. It has failed us, held us poorly, and requires absolution before it can be reinhabited. Could the very way we move through the world, using flesh as our medium, itself constitute a poetics?
Heat runs beneath that corporality, surfacing and breaking like a fever. In “Beside Myself,” the reader is asked to imagine a flame inside their body and then “inhale … / until it fills me. / Until I’m flush / with myself, one whole person.” Smith offers rendering oneself whole as a process over which the reader might have ownership. The poem “Window Seat” turns this phenomenon inward and colder:
. . . I’m no stranger
to small deprivations. For a year I kept
myself like a flame, cupping my hand
around my wavering life whenever
the wind picked up, looking nowhere
but in—where else, alone, to look?
This poem takes the shape of a portrait of survival plucked bare. A hand cupped around a flame is the smallest container in the book, and it is the only one made out of the speaker herself. She is simultaneously the vessel and what the vessel holds. The arrangement holds—the fire stays lit; the crisis is survived—but a hand around a flame is a hand doing nothing else. It cannot reach and it cannot be filled. “For a year I kept” hangs for a beat as an intransitive phrase—“kept” the way that preserves keep, sticky and unspoiled—before the next line turns it into “kept / myself like a flame,” an act of labor. An act of rationing is extended into a kind of tending across a white space, echoing the economical image of “small deprivations.” The final beat of this poem “—where else, alone, to look?” represents a search that returns nothing to us: no reward, no aftermath, no afterlife of the light.
That is the kind of question that sends a reader looking for a system, some logic, some desperate calculus of hope, and I found myself reaching for the Nietzschean model of redemption. Nietzsche posits that the meaning of a past event can be transfigured from negative to positive by claiming authorship of it, by looking at the whole shape of a life and being able to say—choosing to say—I willed it thus.
The mechanism, in these poems, is narrative. An event gains its meaning because of its position in a sequence, and sequences can be extended. As one adds new moments to a life, one alters the weight and influence of the old. Even the worst beats of one’s journey become necessary—not excused or dismissed but structurally required by the shape the life turned out to have. Poems work the same way, each pause and inflection building on the last; a poem earns its force because every word operates in conjunction with the others, and no line is separable from the image the whole is building. The house of the poem stands only because of the particular arrangement of its rooms.
Smith’s speaker chooses not to defer this operation to the end of her life. Her speaker performs it at a midpoint—after a marriage ends, with children still small, in the ordinary middle of a life where the ending has to be guessed at and the overarching shape gestured at. Redemption here is not a final accounting but an ongoing revision, which strikes me as both braver and more precarious. And Smith knows the precarity. “The Before Picture” refuses consolation outright: “The future / is where I’m going only because / I have no choice, because time / moves in one direction, dragging / a bit of itself behind like meat.” Perhaps this is what teleology looks like without a clear telos: purpose replaced by momentum, the past raw and trailing.
One of the most unnerving moments in the book arrives in the poem that borrows its opening line from Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. What makes an ending tragic, Smith proposes, with no attempt to soften the blow, is “the happiness / that precedes it”:
. . . The happiest
story with the saddest
ending is textbook tragedy,
and it’s your life, if you’re lucky.
The airtight quality of this poetic logic renders it devastating. Smith gives the reader no image to duck behind—only the bare terms. Every outcome is a loss: the happier the life, the more tormenting its close; the only alternative is to have had less worth losing.
Narrative coherence, as a tool of redemption, focuses on the contours of a life that give it its overall form, which in turn allows us to reclaim the moments within. What if a “well-shaped” life is precisely the one whose ending will ruin you?
Ultimately, I willed it thus is a sovereign utterance. One person speaks it over the record of their life, and it requires no witness to take effect. The will authorizes itself, in private. Smith appears to lean into this mechanism but refuses its solitude with, “Who to hand these things to—these thoughts that accumulate each day like stones in my pockets. Whose palm to drop them into.” It is the same hand—the one cupping the flame, open now, looking to relieve itself. The risk is not the loss of a life that cannot be narrated, but a narration with no listener, weight bulging in the pockets of a self with none to help bear the burden.
What if redemption is not an act of will performed alone, but a transfer? This is the work the poems are illustrating through their very bodies. The stanza—the Italian word for “room”—is where the transfer happens, and the reader is the recipient. We are the ones the stones get handed to, kept in these rooms just long enough that the walls begin to slough off on us, and we must bear some of the weight ourselves.
Smith’s treatment of selfhood across time is where the redemptive project has the space to do some of its most poignant work. “Time-Stamped” makes the practice of revision literal: a future version of the speaker looks back and reduces her past self to a “prototype,” a premature draft. The vertigo compounds as the speaker begins to see every previous version of herself still standing there, like in a fun house, “never overridden or replaced / but saved, each of us saved.”
The speaker does not discard her roughest drafts but archives them. While the diachronic self—the self across time—may be necessarily fractured, Smith suggests that it can still be gathered synchronically, in the ache of the now, all versions present at once. We can engage ourselves in the process of gathering these past selves and looking at them in the eye without necessarily fusing them.
“Self-Portrait as an Incomplete List of Mysteries,” the collection’s ars poetica, is built on an anaphoric rhythm that lets Smith iteratively construct the strangeness of making, of becoming, of being. Guiding the reader down a winding staircase, step after step, towards no clear landing, Smith proposes that “a poem is both the born creature and the birth record,” which is not built but “becomes”—it “arrives” at her feet. Smith wonders what she is to the poem “if not its parent,” then extends the image until her children become poems too, finding the “door” of her and opening it into the world, having perhaps knocked elsewhere first.
The poem goes on to illustrate that “writing about an experience” is what “reinscribes the memory,” and that “language constantly revises the mind.” Narrating a life would not merely reinterpret it; it would rewire the equipment doing the interpretive work. The poem’s final admission, “How I could have been anyone, but I am this,” is a simple contingency that is the nearest thing to affirmation the book offers. Moreover, the poems that begin with borrowed lines, from McCracken and from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, literalize the book’s proposition that art is an extended conversation, that a life is assembled in part from the movements of others’ minds.
We are reminded that the record of life that Smith’s speaker bases her assessment on is partial: “I wrote / only what I could see,” she admits. The narrative of a life inevitably inherits the shallowness of the vision that concocted it. There is something ludicrous in the effort, too—in how we keep building containers for the uncontainable, insisting on shape and sense and style where the material offers none. Within the short, striking column of the poem “For years I lived,” the speaker confesses to having treated her life as “clay / or wood or even stone”—as raw material with a form latent inside it, her job to reveal that form by chiseling away. Smith names the absurdity outright: a life is water. Our work is not sculpting but “letting it fill / the spaces it runs to.” We must let our lives do “what water does: It goes.”
Irony lies in the fact that A Suit or a Suitcase is itself a made object—sequenced, deliberate, a life given a shape and compartments it did not have while it was being lived. To write any poem, after all, one must arrest some quality of an experience. We see here what the costs of imposing a shape on our lives are: only a formed thing can break. Water cannot. The chisel we arm ourselves with may produce the very wound the rest of the book is trying to salve.
What if rather than attempting to mold the water into a form, one merely moved the rocks away from the riverbed? Perhaps, then, the rapids of memory—and the living of a life—would become more bearable. It is by crafting these poems, which externalize a deeply textured emotional life, that Smith’s speaker succeeds in destabilizing some of these rocks, which she hands off to the reader. As a result, we become actively invested in helping the speaker maintain the arc of her life, of supporting the project of preserving and passing on the chorus of her previous selves.
The final poem “I call them back to me—” summons the speaker’s past selves to where she stands now, all erupting into the synchronous moment, those “flimsy,” “vellum-thin,” and “unfinished” things. “Come back, come back,” the speaker insists, “I can finish it.” This is not a conclusion but a plea, an urgency to transmute the archive into a unified being—to gather every saved draft into a single whole self. This moment is also an admission that the finishing has not happened. Perhaps it never will.
A Suit or a Suitcase functions as training in a difficult skill: how to remain in wonder, how to keep looking for where the grace in living is hiding, and how to get any of this—whatever this may be or feel like—into someone else’s hands before our pockets give out. How to share and hand over bits of a life. Smith’s poems do not deliver a clear model of a life well-worn. They deliver something more useful: the practice of bearing witness to the architecture of a life, clear-eyed.
