Vivian Smith – February 3 2019

Photo: Vicki Frerer

Vivian is an editor, researcher, critic, reviewer and award-winning poet. He holds an MA in French from the University of Tasmania, where he taught French for ten years before moving to Sydney, and a PhD from the University of Sydney, where he taught English and Australian literature for many years before his retirement. Vivian’s first poems were published in the Sydney Bulletin while he was still at school and, while not prolific, he went on to publish several collections of poetry over a 50 year career including The Other Meaning, Familiar Places: poems, Tide Country, Selected Poems, New Selected Poems, Late News and The Other Side of Things. While his early work was highly praised and encouraged by Kenneth Slessor, Douglas Stewart, David Campbell and Laurence Collinson, more recently he has been enthusiastically rediscovered by a new generation of poets including Michael Brennan, Luke Davies and John Kinsella.

An Island South
Angus and Robertson, 1967; ISBN 9780207949289
Tasmania remains the focal point in An Island South, which conveys the island’s cold still luminosity and searches for a vision in which contradictions are held in balance, pain and fragmentation can be withstood and understood. A group of savagely comic satires introduces a new detachment and toughness of tone and a new range of human figures, especially of two Tasmanian women artists and a Sydney refugee from Vienna who were significant in Smith’s development, and whose highly individual and isolated lives reflect wider human issues. – https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/vivian-smith

Along the Line
Salt Publishing, 2006; ISBN 9781844710669
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.
‘Vivian Smith’s deceptively delicate poems literally vibrate with an inner strength …. 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