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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.
List of contents
Sydney Perhaps Night Life A Pair of Scissors Reply to an Unsolicited Letter Traveller's Tale Tune To a Bottle Tree Remembering W H S Posthumous Retrospective The Names: 1938-45 On The Circuit Summer of the Ladybirds Short Story The Colonial Poet Remembering George Dibbern Friends And Ancestors Herbs Of The Tarahumara Another Chance History The Point In the Colonial Museum The Dream Poetry Reading Happiness Letter from Sydney A Few Words For Maxi A Room In Mosman An die Musik Meeting An Effect Of Light An Enigma Angels' Trumpets At An Exhibition Of Historical Paintings, Hobart Back In Hobart Balmoral Summer Bus Ride Chance Meeting Deathbed Sketch Despite the Room Early Arrival Sydney Dialogue Family Album Late April: Hobart For My Daughter For Nan Chauncy: 1900-1970 Gabrielle In The Grounds Of The Old University, Hobart Jacaranda Lines For Rosamond Mcculloch One Season Philoctetes Impromptu For George Davis Postcard From The Subtropics Quiet Evening Reflections Return to Hobart For Edith Holmes: Tasmanian Painter Sea Glass Slope With Boulders Sparrows: Mosman Summer Band Concert Summer Notes Summer Sketches: Sydney The Candles The Room There Is No Sleight Of Hand View From The Domain, Hobart Warmth In July: Hobart Wrong Turning Winter Twenty Years Of Sydney Il Convento, Batignano The Traveller Returns From Korea Onion in a Jar My Morning Dip The Edge of Winter Beyond this Point Still Life The Restorers Revisiting The Man Fern Near the Bus Stop Late May: Sydney Looking Back Dung Beetles Tasmania Autumn Reading Convolvulus At the Parrot House, Taronga Park The Peacock Summer Feeling Crows In Winter Half of Life Under the Pine Corona Mosman Bay Sirius Cove Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos The Return
About the author
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."
Summary
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.
