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. 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 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

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