The Blue Coat

Description

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, this latest collection demonstrates Smither's talent for illuminating the poetry in the everyday - an out-of-season daffodil, a chipped Limoges plate. She is a master of the unfolding poem, in lines that take you from a single image to the cusp of something larger. At times meditative, at times playful, even slightly subversive, this collection impresses with a surety of word, a deft touch and a polished harmony.

Distinguished writer Elizabeth Smither was the 2001-2003 Te Mata Poet Laureate. In 2004 she was awarded an honorary DLitt from the University of Auckland for her contribution to literature and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She was given the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2008.

"Poised between the quotidian and the sublime, alert to both the glamour and the dogshit of Paris, Smither emerges from this collection as an uncommonly attractive poetic personality, by turns whimsical, piquant, learned, heartfelt, and acute, with a quick eye for absurdities, but never supercilious or scathing, inclined on the contrary to join in the fun." --Sunday Star-Times on The Year of Adverbs