Author Description

By the time he died in 1995, Kendrick Smithyman was regarded as one of New Zealand's most important poets. For decades, though, the uncompromisingly intellectual, relentlessly experimental Smithyman had to endure marginalisation and even ridicule at the hands of conservative editors and critics. Some of Smithyman's work was so far ahead of its time that it can only now hope to find a wide audience. Private Bestiary consists of poems discovered by Scott Hamilton during his exploration of the massive collection of private papers Smithyman bequeathed to the University of Auckland library. These previously-unseen pieces illuminate aspects of Smithyman's life and work that were hitherto obscure, and help us appreciate the extent of his achievement as a writer and a man. Reading Private Bestiary, we discover the young Smithyman protesting passionately about the marginalisation of Maori culture, at a time when most Pakeha intellectuals were oblivious to the subject. We see Smithyman experimenting with surrealism and with the prose poem in the conservative 1950s, when most other Kiwi poems were content to compose in traditional forms and use dowdily 'realistic' imagery. We encounter a series of 1960s poems which mix confessions about Smithyman's troubled personal life with black commentaries on the state of New Zealand society. We discover a number of wild, weirdly fragmented poems that appear to be attempts at a Rimbaud-like 'alchemy of the word'. Scott Hamilton is a social scientist as well as a literary scholar, and the notes he supplies at the back of Private Bestiary explain the historical and political as well as the literary significance of these extraordinary discoveries.