with syntactical complexity, dense argument, and many references. "[H]is poetry, above all, was academic in style. Smithyman's verse was notorious for its knotty language and allusive obscurity." Many of the poems from this period were eventually collected in Inheritance (1962) and Flying to Palmerston (1968). The early 1960s he spent less effort on poetry and more on literary criticism, notably A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (1965). The book's description of the aesthetics and practice of Auckland poets, whose work he dubbed "academic" (including M. K. Joseph, Keith Sinclair, Mary Stanley, C. K. Stead, and the later work of Allen Curnow), also provided insights into his own outlook and poems. "This idiosyncratic book – the first full-length study of the subject – analysed the Romantic affiliations of earlier New Zealand poets, and pointed to subtle regional differences (especially between Auckland and Wellington poets) in his own generation," according to Peter Simpson. A change in style From 1960 to 1965, Smithyman stopped writing poetry. Smithyman's poetry changed in style at some point or points in the 1960s or very early 1970s, although critics differ as to when the new style started appearing, and they can't pin down the cause. According to Ian Richards, the poem "Flying to Palmerston", which Smithyman wrote in an airport lounge in 1966 and which later became the title piece for the 1968 book, "signalled a new start in a new manner" in the poet's verse. "There is critical consensus that between this poem and his next collection, Earthquake Weather, in 1972, Smithyman's mature style emerged." Smithyman was promoted to senior tutor at the University of Auckland in 1966, and he held the post until 1987. A six-month stay in 1969 at the University of Leeds as a visiting fellow in Commonwealth literature resulted in travel in Britain and North America, which stimulated many poems. On returning home in 1970, his poetry engaged the landscapes, history and people of his native Northland, as seen in Earthquake Weather, as well as The Seal in the Dolphin Pool (1974), and Dwarf With a Billiard Cue (1978). "Whatever the biographical reasons (travel, maturity, a grown-up family) the next book, Earthquake Weather (1972) is a different kind of book, more like the four volumes that have followed than anything previous", Murray Edmund wrote in 1988. Some of these works became his most admired verse and are his