John Maynard’s What’s It Like To Be Old? is a candid, restless, often funny poetry collection about aging as both bodily fact and inner weather. Across sections like “Consider Old Age,” “Evaporating Immortality,” “Limits,” and “Ripeness,” Maynard keeps circling the same hard question from different angles: what happens when the self still feels vividly alive, but the body begins sending smaller, colder messages? The poems move from blunt jokes about pills, poop bags, doctors, and ice cream to startlingly tender meditations on desire, friendship, pain, memory, and the stubborn wish to keep saying yes to life.

I liked how little vanity there is in the voice. Maynard doesn’t smooth old age into wisdom, and he doesn’t turn it into one long lament either. He lets it be ridiculous, sexual, embarrassing, frightened, bored, grateful, and suddenly radiant. A poem like “Jump-Shot Air Ball” could have been only comic, with its missed poop-bag toss and pratfall, but beneath the joke, there’s a real tremor: Is this what decline looks like when it first starts arriving in ordinary gestures? Then later, in “Old Glory,” a flag barely moving in the wind unexpectedly moves, not because of easy patriotism, but because endurance itself has begun to feel mysterious. That emotional turn felt earned to me. The book is best when it catches those small, almost private jolts of recognition.

The writing has a rangy, plainspoken looseness that I found more affecting than polished lyricism would have been. Maynard often favors short lines, singsong rhymes, and conversational pivots, sometimes to comic effect, sometimes to make the poem feel like a thought trying to steady itself while walking. I didn’t love every rhyme or every joke equally; a few pieces lean into bawdy humor or blunt complaint that they feel more like table talk. But even that roughness belongs to the book’s honesty. The ideas are strongest when they resist consolation. In “False Alarms,” the body becomes a series of warnings until one day the warning is real, while “A Sudden Jumping Joy” insists that older people aren’t simply morose, they’re capable of fierce happiness when life grants even three good days, or three good hours. That felt painfully true.

By the end, I felt What’s It Like To Be Old? had done something quietly brave: it had made aging feel less like an abstraction and more like a lived room, cluttered with prescriptions, jokes, losses, appetites, dogs, doctors, memories, and light. The book’s candor gives it weight, and its tenderness keeps returning just when the bitterness might have taken over. I’d recommend it to readers who appreciate reflective, accessible poetry about mortality, especially those interested in the emotional comedy and ache of later life.

Pages: 90 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GNXK5Q9G