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.
An accomplished collection of poems, A Pattern of Marching brings us messages of cool precision and accuracy from Elizabeth Smither. Restrained elegance, fine craft and wit characterise the verses. This is, in the words of the last line of the title poem, 'A skilled performance anyone could share'.
A repository for a personal collection of quotations, scraps, pensées, and poems, this compilation offers keen insight into the influences and inspirations of a writer, namely Elizabeth Smither. There are no platitudes or sententious maxims here; instead, these sometimes pensive sometimes screamingly funny quotations range from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to Elizabeth Bennet, from Charles Simic to Montaigne, and from Monty Python to Henry James. Witty and intriguing, this record also demonstrates the results of the creative process by including Smither's own work.
In Elizabeth Smither's eighteenth collection of poetry her words are as vital as ever. The poems take the everyday &– mothers and daughters, cats and horses, books and bowls, slippers and shirts &– and transform them into something fresh: sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often enchanted. And throughout, the work is infused with the personality of the author: a quirky, whimsical observer of the mundane world around her, which she shows to be full of surprises.
A lovely new collection by a leading New Zealand poet. This is among her best work, moving through a range of attentions—gardens, friends, works of art—with great charm and unexpected and quirky wit.
Elizabeth Smither brings wit, warmth and wisdom to this absorbing and beautifully written inter-generational story.' Peter Simpson 'Smither has written a deeply felt, closely observed, tightly patterned novel about how we treat each other and how we should treat each other.' Paul LIttle, North & South 'Such is the grace and skill at work in Smither's writing, I put it down feeling I'd been contemplating art.' Catherine Woulfe, NZ Listener 'A work of deft characterisation . . . a novel whose plot and cast are charted with particular, poetic and plentiful care.' Siobhan Harvey, The New Zealand Herald Sylvie rows across a lake to her wedding. Madeleine flees to Paris and works in Le Livre Bleu bookshop. Isobel is summoned to her doctor's surgery late one afternoon. Elizabeth Smither takes us into the richly imagined worlds of three women - Sylvie, her mother Madeleine and grandmother Isobel. The narrative shifts between the three women in three different cities: Auckland, Paris and Melbourne. Elizabeth tells their stories with warm, deeply observant humour, through their love affairs, rivalries, marriages and all the beautiful minutiae of everyday life. She draws the threads together subtly and surprisingly to achieve a perfectly resolved ending. Described as having 'a gift for wry comedy combined with an eye for pinpoint detail', Elizabeth is one of New Zealand's finest writers.
On the day Lola Dearborn vowed to never attend another funeral, she was deliberately present at three . . . Lola Dearborn marries into Dearborn & Zander, a family of funeral directors, when she falls for Sam Dearborn at a dance. But when Sam, and her friend Alice Zander, injured in a freak accident, die, Lola devotes the rest of her life to exploration. She takes up residence in an art-deco hotel, she befriends the members of the Sylvester Quartet after gate-crashing a rehearsal. She reflects on the different kinds of love offered by men: Luigi the Italian undertaker who buries a dog with its owner, and Charles the retired surgeon with his disruptive daughter, Brandy. Lola's themes underpin an exploration of love and death (including pet cemeteries), music and friendship. Set between Australia and New Zealand, it is a story both acute and amusing, knowledgeable and questing - much like Lola herself.
One of New Zealand's leading poets, Elizabeth Smither has published many collections and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Her poems are characteristically slim, so the substantial selection of her work gathered in The Tudor Style has a striking effect. As Bill Manhire says, Smither's poems 'wave to one another, open doors and climb through windows'. This subtle and witty interconnectedness is a distinctive quality in her work. The poems show a delight in image, epigram and unexpected anecdotes. These swift darting poems return to themes such as women friends, gardens, figures of legend and story, religious experience and conversations. They form a striking and original whole, revealing Smither as a distinguished poet.
Whimsical and tender, this poetry collection examines the commonplace and the quirky for resonance, contemplation, and verve. From an out-of-season daffodil and a chipped Limoges plate to a lipstick stain on a poem and a bee being released, it illuminates the poetry in the everyday by focusing on a single image and expanding to the cusp of something larger. At times meditative, at times playful—even slightly subversive—this compilation impresses with a surety of word, a deft touch, and a polished harmony.
Elizabeth Smither is widely known as one of New Zealand's leading poets, but she is also a writer of short stories of the very finest quality. In this new collection, her fourth, Smither has produced stories that are witty and sharply observed and reveal her distinctive ironic sympathy with the lives of ordinary people.
This beautifully drawn new novel by the acclaimed Elizabeth Smither features two families over a period of several decades. When we first meet Polly Bening and Daniel Maplethorpe they are 10-year-old ballet hopefuls at a dance school in a small New Zealand town. Daniel is the sole boy in the ballet class; his father is hostile and Daniel is beaten up by boys in his school. Over the next few decades Daniel goes overseas to dance and becomes an international ballet star. Polly, although all agree she could go further , becomes a teacher, moves to Australia and marries an Australian cricket commentator. There s a lot of cricket in the book; at one stage Polly s daughter Priscilla meets Steve Waugh. Relationships, illnesses, deaths, triumphs, regrets with great skill Smither allows the family stories to unfold, never putting a foot wrong as she juggles shifts in time and place.
Elizabeth Smither was appointed New Zealand's third Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate in 2000. The laureateship is for a term of two years and has the twin aims of honouring the work of New Zealand's foremost poets and raising the profile of poetry in the community. Red Shoes, the collection that resulted from Elizabeth Smither's term as Poet Laureate, celebrates the pleasure, not just to be had from wearing red shoes (or a red dress), but friendships, parties, music, getting drenched at a bust stop. In these poems you will find young and old, meditations on a favourite book about death, gardens, and proven methods of making progress.
Covering three generations of a single family from rural Tasmania and Broken Hill to Auckland and New Plymouth, Emma, Irene and Maud are three sisters from a family of twelve. The novel follows their lives as they leave home and grow into middle age and their experiences with birth, death, romance, and adultery.
Ruby Duby Du is a little suite of poems written by Elizabeth Smither for her granddaughter, Ruby. They begin with conception and end with a family gathering where Ruby counts stars. They progress through an amusingly competitive grandmother and grandfather, sleeplessness, an heirloom dress and Ruby at an Italian restaurant where she takes a bite out of a polystyrene pillar - the day to day l ife of little girl and her grandmother.
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