Violinist In Spring, The
Smaill, Anna
Published 2005
ISBN 9780864735027
Format paperback
Category Poetry
RRP: $24.95
The first collection by one of New Zealand’s most promising young poets.
Anna Smaill’s poems are ‘the result of a deep and patient meditation and have been, as it were, truly lived through, so they ring true’. —Bernadette Hall
‘There is a rhythmic confidence, a musicality about her use of cadence and syntax, which makes her poems stick on the page; and there is a way in which quite idiosyncratic unfoldings of clauses and phrases seem entirely effortless and quite inevitable.’
—Bill Manhire
Home
First you make your home with words.
They are ready and close round,
compact to the real contour
of the cavity’s curled palm.
Fingers move under their first weight
as light sets: calm against skin.
Without qualm connections meet –
exact the gap between the floor and feet.
The lines of sight veer and swoop
flying with no threat of break.
They are reeling in the scattered distance,
these tracking calls of vision.
Here in the quiet dark
you wait without hearing
time, without knowing waiting,
without knowing fear.
Pooled in the centre is yellow light.
You crouch here, in the corner.
Press the treadle, it turns, slowly
draw and twist the thread.
Praise for The Violinist in Spring
Named one of the Listener's Best Books 2006
Smaill is a genuine poet, and this is work to savour.
THE LISTENER
It takes either a novice or a poet who knows what she is about to rhyme "slime" with "time" and "octopi". Smaill is certainly the latter. In her astonishingly confident first collection, she is unfazed by grammatical rules and poetic conventions and often ignores them in pursuit of what sounds and looks right.
SALIENT
I like Smaill's focus on empowerment and self-sufficiency. Her poems show that she can take care of herself. The Violinist in Spring is inspiring.
Hamesh Wyatt OTAGO DAILY TIMES