This work comprises four journals kept at different times since 1975 by the poet Elizabeth Smither. It records a rich life of the mind and of feelings, discussing friends, events, literary and religious ideas, gardens, clothes and more.
This work comprises four journals kept at different times since 1975 by the poet Elizabeth Smither. It records a rich life of the mind and of feelings...
Arriving eight years afterthe poet'slast prize-winning offering, this collection explores the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities andalive with incidents.Travelingfrom NewZealand to Paris and back again, the poems tracea wedding, a birth, and several deaths, and offer revealing glimpses of Fats Waller, Eliza Bennet, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck, and Jean-Paul Sartre.Featuring such imagery asa horse playing an accordion, the compendium adeptly showcases the poet's verbal playfulness, distinctive wit, and unique style."
Arriving eight years afterthe poet'slast prize-winning offering, this collection explores the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities andalive...
Elizabeth Smither's poems - brief, darting and full of unexpected insights - inhabit back gardens and vast landscapes, art galleries, restaurants, educational courses, public transport and are peopled with family and friends from the present and the past. They fit together in a quite distinctive way: the point is not simply the pleasure of juxtaposition, it is the way...details transform each other through mutual awareness, writes fellow poet Bill Manhire.
Elizabeth Smither's poems - brief, darting and full of unexpected insights - inhabit back gardens and vast landscapes, art galleries, restaurants, edu...
A wind that only the widest gardens can hold. A lipstick stain on a poem. A bee released - with recourse to a letter from the Inland Revenue Department. A grey sky like a governess, a mother dressed by her two-year-old son, a flurry of leaves behind a tram. In The Blue Coat, Elizabeth Smither examines the quotidian and the quirky for resonance, for contemplation, for verve. Here 'poetry has a place among other bodies', but also in enclosed gardens, in Chinese restaurants, in margins and in memory - 'sometimes open and hospitable, sometimes secret, behind dark hedges'. Whimsical and tender,...
A wind that only the widest gardens can hold. A lipstick stain on a poem. A bee released - with recourse to a letter from the Inland Revenue Departmen...