The Year of Adverbs

Arriving eight years after the poet's last prize-winning offering, this collection explores the stuff of daily life, fizzing with personalities and alive with incidents. Traveling from New Zealand to Paris and back again, the poems trace a wedding, a birth, and several deaths, and offer revealing glimpses of Fats Waller, Eliza Bennet, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Featuring such imagery as a horse playing an accordion, the compendium adeptly showcases the poet's verbal playfulness, distinctive wit, and unique style.

Elizabeth Smither is a librarian, a journalist, and the first woman to hold the New Zealand Poet Laureateship. She is the author of 13 poetry collections, including The Lark Quartet, and an autobiography, The Journal Box. In 2004 she was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her contributions to literature.