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Vivian Smith

Vivian Smith is an elder statesman of Australian poetry, one of the most highly regarded poets of his generation. Born in Hobart in 1933, he has lived in Sydney since 1967. He has published eight collections of poetry as well as critical and scholarly works on Australian writers. His awards include the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Patrick White Literary Award and the Grace Leven Prize.

Titles

Here, There and Elsewhere

Vivian Smith

96 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published March 2012
ISBN 9781920882815

Vivian Smith is renowned for the clarity, simplicity and directness of his poems. Transparent in their openness, they point gently to what remains unspoken. The poems in Here, There and Elsewhere draw on memories of life in Hobart and Sydney, travels in Europe and South America, old friends and respected writers, and the poet’s years as a teacher of French and Australian literature. They look back at youth from age, they reflect on paths not taken, and those that were, they consider the influence of death.

There is a strong sense of the poet, presented in a very personal way, ‘searching for the sense of what is real/ the truth of what I am and what I feel’. The collection includes a sequence on the Ern Malley affair, told from the point of view of Ern Malley himself, who wants to be left alone to preserve his integrity; and two autobiographical essays reflecting the poet’s cosmopolitan outlook, one on the exhibition of French paintings shipwrecked off the Tasmanian coast in 1952, the other on the three houses of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.