Night Horse

In Elizabeth Smither's eighteenth collection of poetry her words are as vital as ever. The poems take the everyday - mothers and daughters, cats and horses, books and bowls, slippers and shirts - and transform them into something fresh: sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often enchanted. And throughout, the work is infected with the personality of the author: a quirky, whimsical observer of the mundane world around her, which she shows to be full of surprises. 'Elizabeth Smither's world is the people she knows, the places she visits, the animals she encounters. As they appear in her work they take on mysterious, sometimes surreal, qualities. Her imaginative world is charming and enchanted, peculiar, whimsical, and often very funny' - C. K. Stead 'W. H. Auden once defined poetry as a game of knowledge, a bringing to consciousness, by naming them, of emotions and their hidden relationships . This definition suits Smither's poetry, too, with its sophistication, its wit and humour, its playfulness, its candour, its tenderness, its exploration through simile and metaphor of the unexpected relations between things' - Peter Simpson 'The freshness of Elizabeth's vision, her altogether metaphorical way of looking at the world, constantly surprises. Then there is the course her poems take, rising into something which hits, or is very like, the sublime. Her work is replete with a humanity that draws the reader in, moves us and stays with us, achieving what the Chinese call 'the meaning beyond the words' - Diana Bridge