Maggie Smith’s newest poetry collection (and her 11th book overall) is a contemplation of the big questions: What does it mean to be an eternal being in a body that can—and will—fail in the end? What really happens after we die, and if we got to choose our afterlives, what would they be? In the meantime, what does it mean to have accumulated a life of poems, bills and children when all of it is likely insignificant to a god who may or may not be watching us from above?
A Suit or a Suitcase might best be described as a midlife retrospective, where the poet has covered enough ground to know many of the rules—that the world is a hard place, that everything changes and yet our souls are our constant companions—but still wonders what is left to come. In a long poem titled “Self-Portrait as an Incomplete List of Mysteries,” which comprises the middle of the book, Smith marvels at how things that were once true to us do not stay true over time, just as gold-plated jewelry eventually wears down and reveals its base metals beneath. In another line, the speaker asks why our fragile human bodies have not developed “a more durable design.”
The lines, as well as the poems themselves, are sometimes lighthearted and at other times heavy with humanity, which, at every moment in history (and certainly now) weighs us down with our responsibilities as well as our vulnerabilities. And yet, true to Smith’s aesthetic, there is space for hope and joy. There are the many lives we live and the ways we get better at surviving them; there are children to love and for whom to hope for a slightly better future; and finally, there is the world, both beautiful and beastly, the source of our woes and the scene of every wonder we’ve ever witnessed. It is all difficult, and yet there is still reason enough to try to finish the story, as Smith declares in the final lines of A Suit or a Suitcase. We seek to figure out what it all means, even if the unspoken truth is that we will never fully know until our bodies have packed us up like luggage and taken us away.
Check out more selections for Poetry Month 2026.
