The Blue Coat

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 Smithers 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. See more