Marty Smith
Marty Smith teaches English and Creative Writing at Taradale High School in Hawkes Bay, as Marty Schofield. Her poems have been published in literary journals such as Sport, Landfall and Turbine; on the international website The Page: Poetry, Essays and Ideas, in Best New Zealand Poems 2009 and Best of Best New Zealand Poems. The manuscript for her debut collection Horse with hat was short-listed for the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award.
Marty grew up on a fairly steep and wild farm in the North Wairarapa, which was hacked from the bush by her great-grandfather. There are still hundred-year old fallen trees in all the paddocks, too difficult to be logged out by bullock train. The farm was big enough and the weather terrible enough to make tough going for one man and his kids.
She grew up in a time when smoking was communal and companionable, and the people she loved floated through a blue haze like mirages. ‘Emphysema for Aunty Gwen’ is her smoking poem.
Smith says: ‘In the Smith family the war was always humming under the surface—not visible, but known. Fusses weren’t tolerated, and we kids and cousins were not to complain. I wanted to bring them back, my father, my aunt and my uncles, for the next round of kids—not just the way they talked, but their values: their independence, their loyalty and their bravery in the way they took whatever came.’
