White lies, hip replacements and ballet with a sawhorse. Parisian drycleaners and the brush of the grass in Central Park. In My American Chair, Elizabeth Smither leads us through serendipitous encounters, the uncanny in the ordinary, the intricacies of friendship and ruminations on mortality. Assured, intimate, witty, revealing – this is a poetry collection to treasure from one of our most beloved voices. When you purchase them you must allow – five stems, fifteen buds, only two half- open – for their circumference to come flouncing, bowing, bending in two days’ time like fifteen girls who have changed into white debutante dresses or five women who have danced all night and come home with the milkman. — ‘The white lilies open’