Private Bestiary: selected unpublished poems 1944-1993

Kendrick Smithyman (edited by Scott Hamilton)

At the time of his death in 1995, Kendrick Smithyman was regarded as one of New Zealand's most important poets. For decades, though Smithyman had to endure marginalisation and even ridicule from editors and critics. Private Bestiary consists of poems drawn from a massive collection of private papers Smithyman bequeathed to the University of Auckland library.

We discover the young Smithyman protesting passionately about the marginalisation of Maori culture. We see Smithyman experimenting with surrealism and with the prose poem in the conservative 1950s. 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 discoveries.

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ISBN 978-1-877441-17-2