The Commonplace Book
by Elizabeth Smither, Auckland University Press, $34.99
The title of this book may trick you into thinking that it will contain writing of little account, a collection of the everyday and possibly be quite banal.
However, Elizabeth Smither has pulled off a real conjuring act - writing that
is so dazzling and effortless that we no longer see the magician furiously sweating as she turns the empty box this way and that before a great cloud of white doves issues forth.
The New Plymouth poet has long kept journals - commonplace books - that record pieces of writing that catch her fancy.
This commonplace book is a gathering together of those quotes and the events that surrounded the collecting of them or the memories they evoke.
Although subtitled "a writer's journey through quotations", this book is more akin to a memoir, albeit one that leaps through time and place.
Smither is never less than interesting on whichever topic she's decided to highlight, and occasionally she's downright hilarious.
Quotes come from everywhere, including TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a sandwich board outside a cafe, letters, and literary works.
One is Colette's supposed last word, "regarde", or "look/observe" and Smither has taken that instruction to heart, being an assiduous observer of the small corners of life, then polishing them up and making something fresh of them.
A man seen changing sheets in a hotel room, a stranger photographing a family group, walking in Paris with her brother, being a librarian, a cobweb on her letterbox, the reliability of cars, nothing is unregarded or too commonplace for further thought.
I can't recommend this book highly enough to those interested in writing and seeing an author at the height of her powers ... and to anyone interested in what it is to be alive. As she writes:
"I think of the commonplace book [the one she is keeping at the time] as something I could give a visitor while I prepare a meal. Have a read of this, I could say. It's more interesting than a photograph album. And it's in my neatest handwriting."
