tations, and dramatic monologues, Midlife contains the best poems Matthew Buckley Smith has written in the nine years since his debut collection. Though the poems in Midlife are not limited to any single project, many touch on recurrent themes, among these the trials of childrearing and marriage, the ever-present shadow of what Larkin calls "Extinction's alp," and the anxious search for meaning that so often attends middle age. As suggested by the epigraph, this is a book that treats with compassion the paradoxical longing that so many of us share with Flaubert's heroine, namely "to die, and also to live in Paris."