Memory and the Past in Maggie Smith's Goldenrod

In Maggie Smith's Goldenrod, memory is not a quiet archive. It is an active, often intrusive presence that blurs time, constructs identity, and forces a reckoning with loss. The speaker's past—childhood homes, family relationships, a dissolving marriage—continuously resurfaces, rarely as a neat narrative but as fragments that demand interpretation. Smith uses memory to question certainty, to investigate how the past keeps shaping the present, and to confront the gaps where memory fails. The collection argues that we live with the past not behind us, but layered into every moment.

Reconstructing Childhood: Fragments of Home

Several poems reconstruct childhood memories through sensory details that anchor the speaker in a specific time and place. In Talk of Horses, the speaker recalls sample lipsticks from an Avon lady on Lilacwood Avenue, cherry trees at an aunt and uncle's, and a grandfather's house with horses—horses the speaker may never have actually seen. The poem asks, “All these pieces, / what do they add up to?” The fragments resist a single story. The speaker's grandmother later loses “almost everything in her mind,” but some memories “swam up / now and then to wake her.” Here memory is both unreliable (the horses may be imagined) and precious—the few things that survive dementia.

Junk trees offers another childhood memory anchored in smell: the Bradford Pears that lined the speaker's street, whose flower smell she describes as “piss” and “baking soda” and finally “smelling of home.” The poem explicitly links the trees to her “girlhood” and to a sense of place. Yet the speaker also calls them “junk trees,” fragile and short-lived. The memory is complicated by the knowledge of impermanence: the city replaces any tree that fails. This duality—nostalgia undercut by decay—runs through many of the collection's backward glances.

In December 18, 2008, the speaker remembers her daughter's birth, describing the newborn as “the emptiest vessel on earth” and “the newest person in the world.” The poem captures a moment frozen in time, but immediately undercuts it: “you knew me / before you knew your own body.” The past becomes a shared origin point that continues to shape the relationship. Yet the speaker admits that the confusion of being embodied “never leaves.” Memory here is not a comfort but a reminder of ongoing disorientation.

Family Legacy and the Threat of Erasure

Family history in Goldenrod is not simply inherited—it is something the speaker carries and fears losing. At the End of Our Marriage, in the Backyard presents a present scene (a neglected lawn) as a metaphor for a relationship that has run its course. The speaker calls the wilding “something—as if / this wilding were intentional.” The past of the marriage is implicit: the letting go, the watching. The poem does not narrate the marriage's history, but memory of what the yard once was (and what the relationship once was) haunts the passive present.

Homesick on a Farm in Franklin, Tennessee deepens this theme. The speaker watches children at a birthday party from a cottage window and begins to cry. The cause is unclear—homesickness, perhaps, or a memory of her own children when they were younger. The past intrudes without warning: “The backdrop here / is a mountain furred with bare trees, or a hill / I consider a mountain because I come from Ohio.” Place triggers memory, and the speaker is transported back to a different landscape and a different self.

The fear of losing memory entirely is made explicit in Woman, 41, with a History of Alzheimer’s on Both Sides of Her Family. The speaker cannot find the keys she locked the door with; she wakes to sounds that may be footsteps or just the creaking of the mattress. The poem links the past (a memory of breaking into a neighbor's apartment with a roommate) to the present anxiety of cognitive decline. That earlier memory is itself ambiguous—the speaker and companion “rearranged the furniture,” a playful act that now echoes her own disorientation. Alzheimer's threatens not just memory but the sense of a coherent self.

The Intrusion of the Past in the Present

Several poems directly explore how the past does not stay past. Threshold describes a desire for a door “you can be / on both sides of at once”—a threshold between “here / and there, now and then.” The speaker imagines crossing a field of timothy grass as passing through endless doorways. This image captures the experience of memory: moving from one moment to another while still feeling the pull of what came before.

For My Next Trick stages a conversation between the speaker and her young daughter about what existed before birth. The daughter asks, “Where was I / before I was in your body?” The speaker answers, “You were nowhere.” The past of the child—nonexistence—becomes a present question. The poem ties birth and death together: “We can’t talk / about birth without / talking about death.” Memory here is not just about what happened, but about the void before and after.

Perhaps the most explicit statement on the nature of the past appears in Joke. In a dream, the speaker tells a manifestation of the past, “I know you're not real.” But the past shape-shifts, changes appearance, and the speaker forgets its name. The poem concludes, “it is the present / as it always is. There is no past.” Yet the poem itself is a memory of a dream about the past, creating a paradox: the statement that the past doesn't exist is made within a meditation on the past's persistence. Smith leaves the reader with the tension between wanting to believe the past is gone and experiencing its ongoing presence.

Complexity and Contradiction

Goldenrod does not offer a simple view of memory. The speaker both clings to memories and admits they may be inaccurate or invented. In Goldenrod, the speaker names a flower “goldenrod” but admits ignorance: “I’m no botanist.” The flower does not care what it is called; it exists independently of the speaker's attempt to label it. This mirrors how the past exists independently of our efforts to remember it. The speaker offers to let the flower name her instead, a gesture of surrender. Memory, like naming, is an act of reaching toward something that ultimately remains separate.

The Alzheimer's poems complicate any nostalgic view of the past. If memory can be erased, what is identity? The speaker's grandmother lost almost everything in her mind, yet some memories “swam up.” The collection refuses to resolve this. The past matters, but it is also fragile, partial, and susceptible to reframing.

Study Questions

1. In Goldenrod, how do sensory details (smells, sounds, colors) function in the representation of memory?
Sensory details anchor the speaker in specific times and places. In Talk of Horses, the sample lipsticks and cherry trees make the past tangible. In Junk trees, the smell of Bradford Pears becomes inseparable from “home.” These details suggest that memory often lives in the body—in what we taste, see, or smell—rather than in linear narrative. Yet the poems also acknowledge that sensory memory can mislead: the speaker may have imagined the horses.

2. How does the poem Joke challenge the idea of a fixed past?
The poem presents the past as shape-shifting and unreal in a dream, yet the speaker still addresses it. The final line—“there is no past”—contradicts the poem's own existence. This paradox suggests that while the past may be a construct, we experience it as inescapably real. The pun on “past” (both time and the verb “to pass”) reinforces the fluidity of memory.

3. What role does the fear of forgetting play in poems like Woman, 41 and Talk of Horses?
In Woman, 41, the speaker fears inheriting Alzheimer's and losing the ability to remember daily details. In Talk of Horses, the grandmother has already lost “almost everything in her mind.” These poems show that memory is not just a source of identity but also a vulnerability. The speaker's attempt to hold onto childhood fragments may be a defense against this erasure.

4. How does For My Next Trick use the daughter's questions about the past to explore existence and death?
The daughter's questions about where she was before birth lead directly into talk of death and separation. The speaker admits she cannot promise an afterlife. By framing the conversation around a child's magic trick (“I’ll vanish you”), Smith links the past (non-existence before birth) with the future (death). Memory of the child's origin becomes a metaphor for all that is lost and cannot be recovered.

5. In what ways does the speaker both trust and distrust her own memories?
The speaker often presents memories as vivid and specific, but she also questions their accuracy. In Talk of Horses, she wonders if she actually saw the horses. In Junk trees, she admits the tree smell could be called “piss.” In Goldenrod, she apologizes for possibly misidentifying the flower. This duality shows that memory is a creative act—the speaker shapes her past even as she tries to recall it faithfully. The tension between reliability and invention is central to the collection.