My American Chair, Elizabeth Smither’s newest collection, contains the words of a seasoned poet interrogating humanity, her encounters and friendships and observing with great acuity the small oddities that exist in the world. It’s Smither’s 18th poetry collection in a distinguished body of work with which she’s twice won Aotearoa’s major poetry award, most recently with Night Horse at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Wit and charm pervade these pages, running with threads of family, personal encounters, mortality, the oddities of nature, and cultural observations. The poetry is meticulous and precise, brimming with robust imagination. In A New Planet, the orb is compared to ‘…a baby’s head / delivered by forceps…’ and goes on to end with a pithy observation about its sun: ‘…as close in its orbit / as a woman is to her handbag.’

The awareness of mortality running through the collection, touched on briefly in the earlier sections, becomes more overt in the second half of the book as a steady, wide-open gaze. The collection lingers on hospitals, surgeons, funerals and remembrances. In The death clean, a programme of clearing one’s possessions and visiting friends is undertaken: ‘all your delicate interests / these busy bowers stripped of flowers.’

Despite this preoccupation, which is only one of many, this isn’t a collection of darkness. Softness flows throughout as well, as shown here in American Grass:

 American grass

In Central Park the grass grows six inches high

and is mown accordingly, leaving

a softness the breeze can stir.

It can touch the ankle of a barefoot child

you can lie on it and have some shelter

not a fortress but a caress.

Someone stepping near you will not step on you

you will hear a footfall as the grass brushes

its music toward you.  

 Reviewed by Erica Stretton