Elizabeth Smither
Encyclopedia
Elizabeth Smither MNZM
New Zealand Order of Merit
The New Zealand Order of Merit is an order established in 1996 "for those persons who in any field of endeavour, have rendered meritorious service to the Crown and nation or who have become distinguished by their eminence, talents, contributions or other merits."The order includes five...

 (born 1941 New Plymouth
New Plymouth
New Plymouth is the major city of the Taranaki Region on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. It is named after Plymouth, Devon, England, from where the first English settlers migrated....

) is a New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

 poet and writer.

She worked as a librarian.

Awards

  • 2002 Te Mata Poet Laureate.
  • 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
    Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
    The Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry is one category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards, given out annually. The award carries a $5,000 prize for each winner of the category awards, including the award for poetry....

  • 2008 Prime Minister's Award for poetry.
  • 2004 Finalist for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards

Poetry


  • You’re Very Seductive William Carlos Williams (1978)
  • The Sarah Train (1980)
  • The Legend of Marcello Mastroianni’s wife (1981)
  • Casanova’s Ankle (1981)
  • Shakespeare Virgins (1983)
  • Professor Musgrove’s Canary (1986)
  • Gorilla/ Guerilla (1986)
  • Animaux (1988)
  • A Pattern of Marching (1989)
  • A Cortège of Daughters (1993)
  • The Tudor Style: Poems New and Selected (1993)
  • Horse Playing the Accordion (Ahadada Books, Tokyo & Toronto, 2009)
  • The Love of One Orange

Novels

  • First Blood (1983)
  • Brother-love Sister-love (1986)
  • The Sea Between Us (2003) 2004 Finalist for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards


Reviews

Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...

knew that her type of poem was hard to do well, and she published sparingly. Elizabeth Smither, by comparison, publishes prolifically. In each book there are some very good poems, the kind that you rediscover later with delight. But many of the poems in The Lark Quartet, as much as we can see where they want to go, don’t quite make it. I wished they had been left longer and worked harder so that their quickness and lightness at the level of ideas could ripen into something more lasting in language.


Smither writes concise, intelligent poems that sometimes exhort, sometimes muse, sometimes simply watch. Smither generally does not rhyme, though ‘Rhyme, Unrhyme’ playfully comments on this by rhyming in stilted couplets and ending by saying, of a causal conversation among working-class New Zealanders on a train, ‘if it rhymes it takes away all their hopes’.


Elizabeth Smither’s poetry book Horse Playing the Accordion is a lively exploration into the ordinary instances of life. Smither alternates between revealing life’s most sublime and solemn (in the case of her funeral poems) instances. We can only marvel as Smither gathers an array of moments, placing them before us to feast on.


Oblique, amused, always probingly intelligent, Smither’s muse is too wry, too self-aware, to demand disciples or to found a “school”. Reading her poetry leaves us the opposite of spellbound.

External links

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