The Soft Black Stars
Matthew Buckley Smith
Rattle Chapbook Prize
Studio City, CA: Rattle, 2026
By the late nineteenth century, English poetry had by and large ceded its place in the hearts of readers to the rambling domestic tales of Dickens and Eliot, Tolstoy and Hugo. To this day, poetry is rarely reviewed in the New York Times and hardly ever mentioned on best seller lists. Still, there does seem to be a resurgence of interest, if only in certain circles, as the culture moves away from extremes of individualism, as people seek engagement in their own communities, and—let’s face it—as our sense of foreboding deepens. Traveling in these gatherings are poems of political and social discontent and even outrage, poems of praise for the natural world, poems of grief and mourning, as well as celebration.
The Soft Black Stars, a chapbook of poems that recently won the Rattle prize, does not partake of these trends in any obvious way. The poet does not tally nature’s losses or gains in a Wordsworthian tradition or construct panoramas of social injustice. Rather, Matthew Buckley Smith dramatizes in 18 poems the intrigues and social dynamism that once filled hundreds of pages. In linking his story in exquisite ways to the ancient world, he captures with verve, technical skill, and humor the delights, deep melancholy, and boredom inherent in settled domestic life far from the capital. The Soft Black Stars is the stuff of Anna Karenina, told by a master craftsman with an ear for the music that Coleridge and Keats took for granted and a keen sense of the foreboding that rarely left the Greeks.
The Soft Black Stars is to date the only narrative of its kind, at least to my knowledge. In the two opening sonnets, we meet a representative man of the first quarter of the 21st century, a man in mid-life plagued by guilt over acts of misogyny past and current, by genuine fear for his own integrity, dignity, and selfhood, and by the frustrations of relating authentically to other human beings. Straightforward, unremarkable in themselves, these sonnets do the necessary scene-setting of the drama that follows.
“Stay-at-Home,” a list poem, itemizes chores, errands, and parental duties of a typical stay-at-home parent.
Something is always broken in the house—
The dryer vent, the smoke alarm, the range,
A glue trap with a not-quite-murdered mouse, (p. 12)
The poet knows well the aimless quality of day-in, day-out housekeeping when the main job is ‘being there,’ on call for whatever domestic needs arise. A good housekeeper might get in a nap, as the poem tells us, or write a poem. Such days can be tiring, but perhaps not in the way his wife, who works outside of the house all day, is tired.
My wife works hard. I do the best I can.
No one who looks at me can see a man. (p. 12)
Properly trained and well-read (or well-versed), almost anyone can master rhyme and meter—even if her ear is made of tin, even if he never ends up writing a good poem. As Smith has observed in his poem-critique podcasts on the well-known SLEERICKETS, there’s skill in knowing when and how to break the rules, though as he well knows, to notice metrical arrangements is only to brush lightly the surface of the poem and will not by itself yield music. Both “Stay-at-Home” and the poem preceding it, “Sonnet for My Daughters,” usefully illustrate some of Smith’s metrical strategies. The father intones,
Tucking you in at night I sometimes think
Of what a piece of shit I used to be,
Of the girls I drove to dinner and to drink,
Whose dads were once pieces of shit like me,
The dads they hugged and left home and defied
In the backset of my ’98 Passat, (p. 11)
The first two lines are flawless iambic pentameter. Beginning in line 3, he breaks free with a hexameter (and three more hexameter lines later on). Line 4 follows with a trochee in the third position, well and good, but it is in line 5 that he makes a telling, subtler move:
The dads / they hugged / and left / home and / defied (p. 11)
The 4th trochaic position (“home and”) puts the accent here on ‘left’ (3rd foot) “home,” a word freighted with meaning, occurring in the unaccented position, presents a hitch in rhythm that may trip the reader. \ “Home” is indeed a stumbling block. Later, the enjambment from the penultimate to the final line—“For good”—is also notably apt for the poem’s saying.
Those girls I thought were mine would sneak back in,
Sometimes to call their friends, sometimes to weep
Sometimes to never think of me again,
But rather of how they’d soon be moving out
For good, those girls I sometimes think about. (p. 11)
The opening line of “Stay-at-Home”—“Something is always broken in the house”— may be a light description of ordinary domestic chaos. But as Smith knows from his training in theater, it is bound to be much more. There follows, almost but not quite in succession, poems from another time and another place, both sequels in effect to ancient texts retold by Ezra Pound. While Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” itself a retelling from the ancient Chinese, captures the young wife’s longing for her absent husband, Smith’s “My Lord You” revisits the wife, as it were, years later, after reality has adjudicated amorous sentiment. It is here, in this poem, that Smith begins to tap into the piercing beauty of domestic life. In the final couplet, reflecting on this lifetime of marriage, the wife reveals
Sometimes in bed, before the light had broken,
I’d watch you sleep and wish we’d never spoken. (p.13)
The domestic life she has described is, of course, the life of our male narrator, so the foreboding expressed here is the narrator’s own. From here, events move swiftly. Two poems—“The Wife” and the title poem—framr the story. Between them rests “Spontaneous Loss,” a loss by miscarriage. I give it in full simply to illustrate—without giving away the plot– the extraordinary music of the poems which follow each other in quick succession.
Those early weeks, you could have been anyone,
…..Too young for fingerprints, much less a name,
And years away from our first catch-and-toss–
…..A little flesh and blood, no brain, no bone,
…..…..No one to blame.
You did not count, you were not even close.
We do our best, over breakfast, over work,
…..To go back to the way things were before,
The way things never technically were not,
…..And we do. We’re fine. You left no lasting mark
…..…..We can’t ignore,
Just a small stain on the downstairs bathroom grout.
That one bad day—the sudden blood, the panic,
…..The clotted towels, the cramped emergency room.
Then we were alone again, more living proof
…..That this is nature’s way, a swift, hygienic
…..…..Numbers game
Which gives us all we need. Which is not enough. (p. 18)
The rhythms of the poem rock exquisitely between anticipation—“our first catch-and-toss”—and mature acceptance– “We do our best.” As we read, we are swayed, entranced, between the piercing detail of ”a small stain on the downstairs bathroom grout” and “that one bad day—the sudden blood, the panic.” We hear the denials—”You did not count,” know them for the ache they represent, and are moved by them. The underlying pulse and music of the poem propel the lines, and we cleave to them as we must to all things beautiful.
There’s earthiness in “clotted towels” and “sudden blood,” and as readers we are used to—indeed, have come to expect—grisly, physical details in our art. What we do not expect—because it is so rare we may forget to look for it—is the kind of subtle and sublime music Matthew Buckley Smith makes in these poems. Such verse craft is unparalleled even among the New Formalists. Sadly, many readers do not expect or look for it.
The penultimate poem, “Lines on His 42nd Birthday,” is an ode that restates and affirms his vows as a loving husband and father, while retaining traces of earlier ruefulness:
You’d see yourself made over from the start,
A sounder body, with a brain that dared
To dream less, and a wholly different heart. (p.29)
This couple will not forget their losses. None of us do. But the final poem returns to a joyful and ecstatic embrace, even as, post-coital, the husband wryly muses on whether his daughters realize that this is how they came to be. This is how the world turns.
The love-knots of marriage, lovers, parent-child-relations, and even friendship form the structural core of The Soft Black Stars. The arc created by its sequence of 18 poems tells the story of an interlude in the lives of two loving parents and two small children. It is a story of depression, guilt, regret, and loss, and also of friendship, acceptance, steadfastness, and love. The husband, in particular, is vividly portrayed, but in the title poem the wife also comes very much alive. Who else among our poets has the kind of narrative aplomb found here? The Soft Black Stars comes to a buoyant ending, forward-looking and joyful. Like any good story, it does what good stories always do—help us to live grounded lives with faith and courage.
Matthew Buckley Smith’s poetry collections include Midlife (Measure, 2024) and Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse, 2012). His poems have been featured in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Poetry Daily.