Author(s): Vivian Smith

Poetry

Here, There and Elsewhere, is Vivian Smith’s first new collection in five years, and his most personal book. The poems draw on memories of life in Hobart and Sydney, travels in Europe and South America, old friends and respected writers, offering quiet lessons for the present, ‘searching for the sense of what is real/ the truth of what I am and what I feel’. There is a sequence on the Ern Malley affair, told from the point of view of the poet, who just wants to be left alone; and two autobiographical essays, on the exhibition of French paintings shipwrecked off the Tasmanian coast in 1952, and on the three houses of Pablo Neruda, both of which are poetic testaments.