Kendrick Smithyman

William Kendrick Smithyman (9 October 1922 – 28 December 1995) was a New Zealand poet and one of the most prolific of that nation's poets in the 20th century.

Family and early life Smithyman was born in Te Kōpuru, a milling and logging town on the Wairoa River near Dargaville, in the Northland Region in the far north of New Zealand. He was the only child of William "Bill" Kendrick Smithyman, an immigrant from England and a former soldier who had fought both in the Boer War and World War I and who had radical political sympathies. Before World War I, he had worked in sugar plantations in Fiji. The poet's father had also been a sailor and waterside worker but fell on hard times during the Depression when the poet was growing up. The father at some points had to work on relief gangs to earn money. His wife, Annie Lavinia Evans, was born in Christchurch. His parents managed a home for elderly men in Te Kōpuru before moving to Auckland in the early 1930s. His service in the armed services was spent in New Zealand except for a short period in 1945 when he was stationed on Norfolk Island, resulting in Considerations, a sequence of poems later published in Landfall and after that in the 1951 edition of Allen Curnow's Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1950. Many of the poems from this period were eventually collected in Inheritance (1962) and Flying to Palmerston (1968). Some of these works became his most admired verse and are his most anthologized poems, including "An Ordinary Day Beyond Kaitaia", "Tomarata", and "Reading the Maps: An Academic Exercise".

Later career In 1980 Smithyman's wife died after a long illness, and in January 1981 at Auckland he married Margaret Ann Edgcumbe, like himself a university tutor. Participation that year in the Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto, Ontario, Canada was fruitful in generating many poems. He died in December 1995 Shortly before his death, he completed Atua Wera, a long poem of almost 300 parts largely about Penetana Papahurihia (also known as Te Atua Wera), an early 19th-century Ngā Puhi religious leader. The poem appeared posthumously as a book in 1997 and "was immediately recognised as perhaps his finest work and one of the major New Zealand poems", according to Peter Simpson. 1950: The Blind Mountain & Other Poems, Christchurch: Caxton Press 1955: The Gay Trapeze, Wellington: Handcraft Press 1957: The Night Shift: Poems on Aspects of Love, by James K. Baxter, Charles Doyle, Louis Johnson and Kendrick Smithyman, Wellington: Capricorn Press 1962: Inheritance: Poems, Hamilton: Paul's Book Arcade 1968: Flying to Palmerston, Auckland: Published for the University of Auckland by the Oxford University Press 1972: Earthquake Weather, Auckland: Auckland University Press 1974: The Seal in the Dolphin Pool, Auckland: Auckland University Press 1978: Dwarf with a Billiard Cue, Auckland : Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press 1979: Menu, Departmental Dinner in Honour of Professor S. Musgrove and Professor M.K. Joseph, the Senior Common Room, 30 November 1979 / [Poetry by W.K. Smithyman], Auckland: s.n. 1983: Centennial Poets, Auckland: Printed for the Centenary Celebrations by the Mt Pleasant Press, University of Auckland; Poems by Kendrick Smithyman, Riemke Ensing, Terry Locke, Mervyn Thompson, Wystan Curnow, Peter Dane 1985: Stories about Wooden Keyboards, Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press 1986: An Informal Occasion in the English Department for Peter Dane, Bill Pearson, Karl Stead, 5 December 1986: Three Poems, Auckland: Department of English, University of Auckland 1987: Are You Going to the Pictures, Auckland: Auckland University Press 1989: Kendrick Smithyman: Selected Poems, "Chosen and introduced by Peter Simpson", Auckland: Auckland University Press 1992: Auto/Biographies: Poems 1987-89, Auckland: Auckland University Press 1997: Tomarata, afterword by Peter Simpson, Auckland: Holloway Press; First published in: The Seal in the Dolphin Pool. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1974. 1997: Atua Wera, Auckland: Auckland University Press (short-listed for Montana Book Awards in 1998) 2002: Last Poems, "With notes by Peter Simpson"; Auckland: Holloway Press 2002: Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, Auckland: Auckland University Press A total of 134 poems written in 1983–1984, but none of them published in his lifetime. Smithyman said he wrote them largely to inform his sons about aspects of their family history. 2004: Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian, Auckland: Writers Group 2004: Collected Poems, 1943-1995, edited & with notes by Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson, Auckland: Mudflat Webworks, ("Electronic book offered as part of the Smithyman Online website compiled by the University of Auckland and published by the online facility of the University of Auckland's Holloway Press, Mudflat Webworks," according to the University of Auckland Library website.)

Criticism 1965: A Way of Saying: a Study of New Zealand Poetry, Auckland: Collins

Edited by Smithyman Each year links to corresponding "[year] in literature" article: 1971: William Satchell, The Land of the Lost, edited and introduced by Kendrick Smithyman, Auckland: Auckland University Press 1985: The New Gramophone Room: Poetry & Fiction, selected by C. K. Stead, Elizabeth Smither, Kendrick Smithyman, Auckland: Department of English, University of Auckland 1985: William Satchell, The Toll of the Bush, Edited and introduced by Kendrick Smithyman, Auckland: Auckland University Press, Oxford University Press 1987: Greville Texidor, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction, edited and with an introduction by Kendrick Smithyman, Wellington: Victoria University Press