Shortly after this flurry of attention, Smith’s marriage fell apart. Near the end of 2018, that bad year, she started posting daily encouragements and affirmations on Twitter. “Today’s goal: Stop rewinding and replaying the past,” she wrote in one representative tweet. “Live here, now. Give the present the gift of your full attention.” She ended that tweet with the same two words that ended all the tweets, clearly a message for herself as well as for her then-16,000 followers: “Keep moving.” Now, in 2020, the worst year yet, comes Smith’s commercial debut: not a collection of poems but a quirky quasi-memoir called Keep Moving, which intersperses those affirming tweets with personal reflections on the hardest days of Smith’s life and features blurbs from the inspirational blogger Glennon Doyle and the singer Amanda Palmer. Four years after “Good Bones” went viral, in the midst of an even grimmer moment in American history, this new book feels like a clear bid to transform Maggie Smith from a famous (for a poet) poet into a guru of literary self-help.
And I imagine myself many years from now, standing in my great grandchildren’s kitchen, nodding my head as they work, whispering in their ears, “That’s right. Keep it up. We will always have plenty.”
In the midst of one lunatic news cycle after another, with more than 200,000 people in the United States having died of COVID-19, it may seem trivial to pay attention to the quietly ongoing loss of neighborhood haunts. But it’s happening everywhere—not just New York City, of course—and it’s happening every day. It represents a cratering of jobs, and it signifies an erasure of local history and character. “We’ll never be the same after this,” people like to mutter these days. The places where we live will never be the same, either.
McCall Smith’s own eye is a feeling one too, and I suppose most of these poems have their origin in passing encounters, in things noticed and then brooded on. He never beats the big drum or shouts his wares in the marketplace. His poetic voice is conversational, companionable, friendly.