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Vivian SmithAlong the Line |
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Biographical note: Vivian Smith was born in Hobart in 1933 and has lived in Sydney since 1967. These, the two oldest cities in Australia, play a central role in his poetry as in his life, providing key geographical and historical images in his exploration of notions of permanence and change, and in his quirky sense of the bizarre in ordinary life. Similarly his studies and teaching in French before his move to Sydney have given his work a distinctive timbre unusual in Australian poetry. For many years Reader in English at the University of Sydney, he is a central figure in Australian literature as teacher, critic, editor and translator. He has published seven collections of poetry and his awards include the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Patrick White Literary Award. Les Murray has written of him, "From first to last there is an integral voice, a controlled richness of language and response, varied with great flexibility."
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844710669
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PAPERBACK
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Short
description/annotation: Filled with precise observation of the interior and exterior world, as well as lashings of wit, Smith’s wide-ranging, often poignant lyrics take us on tour through history, ideas, people and places. He is the perfect travel companion in a sortie of the century and its cultural outputs—as well as its detritus, cast-offs, conflict and ephemera. This perfectly weighted collection offers us pleasure, wisdom and redress.
Main description: Filled with precise observation of the interior and exterior world, as well as lashings of wit, Smith’s wide-ranging, often poignant lyrics take us on tour through history, ideas, people and places. He is the perfect travel companion in a sortie of the century and its cultural outputs—as well as its detritus, cast-offs, conflict and ephemera. This perfectly weighted collection offers us pleasure, wisdom and redress.
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Excerpt from book: Lines for Rosamund McCulloch
Unpublished endorsement : Vivian Smith’s deceptively delicate poems literally vibrate with an inner strength. His work, a powerful Great South Land of the mind, lovingly immersed in awareness of tradition yet astringently modern, profoundly of the landscape yet far beyond it, may yet reveal him to be what some of us suspect he already is: the great Australian poet after David Campbell. In a world that fluctuates between anxiety and panic, the humility and grace and sense of transcendence in these poems restore us to our centre. Luke Davies
Unpublished endorsement : Vivian Smith is a true independent in Australian poetry. He is his own school—belonging anywhere the craft and necessity of poetry are respected and desired. Essentially a lyricist, Smith is a poet of colour and light. His poems are also meditations and contemplations of the relationships between people and the world/s around them, and the spirituality of observation. “Things” are highlighted and vitalised by Smith’s eye, and his unerring ear. A formalist with a delicacy of touch—a conversational flexibility, his poems are painted canvases and musical scores. While a celebrator in so many ways, Smith never shrinks from confronting the erosions and horrors of history—for him, though, language is redemptive, and he seeks to rebuild what has been lost and damaged. Piece by piece, his poems accumulate—never making great claims for themselves, but affirming those points where the senses meet ideas and responsibility. John Kinsella |
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