The Year of Adverbs

Eight years after her last, prize-winning, collection with AUP, The Lark Quartet , this is a new book of poems from a major poet. It is full of the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities, alive with incidents and travelling from New Plymouth to Paris and back again. There is a wedding, a birth, several deaths and funerals as well as glimpses of Walter Raleigh, Fats Waller, Elizabeth Bennet, a car, a bicycle and a horse playing an accordion. Smither’s eye for unexpected likenesses, her verbal playfulness, her distinctive wit and style are everywhere apparent. The book ends with a delightful sequence of ‘little Parisian poems’ revelling in small details of that city and finishing, ‘Au revoir, bonne journee’.