A wind that only the widest gardens can hold. A lipstick stain on a poem. A bee released - with recourse to a letter from the Inland Revenue Department. A grey sky like a governess, a mother dressed by her two-year-old son, a flurry of leaves behind a tram. In The Blue Coat, Elizabeth Smither examines the quotidian and the quirky for resonance, for contemplation, for verve. Here ""poetry has a place among other bodies"", but also in enclosed gardens, in Chinese restaurants, in margins and in memory - ""sometimes open and hospitable, sometimes secret, behind dark hedges"". Whimsical and tender, this latest collection demonstrates Smither's talent for illuminating the poetry in the everyday - an out-of-season daffodil, a chipped Limoges plate. She is a master of the unfolding poem, in lines that take you from a single image to the cusp of something larger. At times meditative, at times playful, even slightly subversive, this collection impresses with a surety of word, a deft touch and a polished harmony.

Elizabeth Smither's poems - brief, darting and full of unexpected insights - inhabit back gardens and vast landscapes, art galleries, restaurants, educational courses, public transport and are peopled with family and friends from the present and the past. They fit together in a quite distinctive way: "the point is not simply the pleasure of juxtaposition, it is the way...details transform each other through mutual awareness", writes fellow poet Bill Manhire.