Elizabeth Smither's poems - brief, darting, and full of unexpected  insights - inhabit back gardens and vast 
landscapes, art galleries, restaurants, educational courses, public transport and are peopled with family 
and friends from the present and the past. They fit together in a quite distinctive way: "the point is not 
simply the pleasure of juxtaposition, it is the way ... details transform each other through mutual 
awareness", writes fellow poet Bill Manhire. Smither writes with a fluency and assurance, 
and is so comfortable in her own voice, that it is easy to take her gifts for granted. Her first full-length 
UK publication, A Question of Gravity, is an extensive selection from five of her most recent 
collections, including Red Shoes (Godwit, 2003), the result of her now concluded two-year term as 
The Mata New Zealand Poet Laureate.  


 Dry stone walls
 
A section has fallen and preserved itself
in its falling: the deconstruction
of piano keys by an axe.
 
Just when they fell no one can tell
about these secret walls and their labours
that seem beyond an earthly patience
 
but how - how 'how' is shown
in each stone added and in this collapse
an imagined note, long-ringing, cascading.
 
                    
 
At Sylvia Plath's grave
 
Waste, say the damp grasses and the wind
the puddles in the churchyard, the cobblestones 
we walk on, looking down
for fear of slipping. 'Where is it?' You
try to remember as we cross
the vacant unploughed - to-be-ploughed -
space, shaggy with fallen twigs and leaves
someone will rake and comb, briefly
for a procession to glide over in grief
put flowers down, lower their heads
against stinging rain. In the present
second row, stone-edged, a little garden
grows feebly while the grasses watch
and a few coins - for what spending? -
glint near the stone. A planted moss
seems determined to make a bed of it
and yet the grasses stronger and stronger grow.
 
                          
 
 
Pansies and cat in a courtyard
(San Ildefonso, University of Alcala de Henares) 
 
The cat, a handsome Siamese, can glide
through gates between the courts and never graduate
but the pansies shiver as if a doctorate
examination approaches: nine hours
 
standing was once the norm, a devil's advocate
in his niche-like box, the examiners
swelled by people from the town, permitted
to ask questions from the floor.
 
If they were linked: each bed across
learned centuries of flowers who observed
the walk of scholars to their rooms, the fruit
of laden brains, stiff legs on cobblestones.