Deconstructing Space: Making Truth in Landscape and Poetry (Critical Essay‪)‬

In my thesis, Syntax and Theme in the Poetry of Kendrick Smithyman, I discuss a way of reading the poetry that makes use of Smithyman's unusual syntax by considering how the syntax and the themes of the poetry are mutually enacted and enabled. In the first chapter, I discuss how Smithyman constructs space by reconfiguring grammatical relations. What follows is the second chapter, which is more thematically oriented. Language is one way to construct space, mapping is another. In Smithyman's poem 'Reading the Maps--An Academic Exercise' (Stories About Wooden Keyboards 39-50) these two modes of construction are brought together and interrogate each other. In this poem, various social and philosophical ideas are explored along with the geographical terrain indicated on the multiple maps of the poem. 'Reading the Maps' is pivotal to Smithyman's oeuvre as it functions as an 'imaginative key'. Northrop Frye makes this comment about such poems: