SMITH, Vivian (Brian)

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Nationality: Australian. Born: Hobart, Tasmania, 3 June 1933. Education: University of Tasmania, Hobart, M.A. 1956; University of Sydney, Ph.D. 1971. Family: Married Sybille Gottwald in 1960; two daughters and one son. Career: Lecturer in French, University of Tasmania, 1955–67. Lecturer. 1967–74, senior lecturer, 1974–82, and reader in English, 1982–96, University of Sydney. Literary editor, Quadrant, Sydney, 1975–90. Awards: Grace Leven prize, 1982; New South Wales Premier's prize, 1983; Patrick White literary award, 1997. Member: Fellow, Academy of Humanities of Australia; Australian Society of Authors. Address: 19 McLeod Street, Mosman, New South Wales 2088, Australia.

Publications

Poetry

The Other Meaning. Sydney, Edwards and Shaw, 1956.

An Island South. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1967.

Familiar Places. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1978.

Tide Country. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1982.

Selected Poems. Sydney. Angus and Robertson. 1985.

New Selected Poems. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1995.

Other

James McAuley. Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1965; revised edition, 1970.

Les Vigé en Australie (for children). Melbourne, Longman, 1967.

Vance Palmer. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1971.

The Poetry of Robert Lowell. Sydney, Sydney University Press, 1974.

Vance and Nettie Palmer. New York, Twayne, 1975.

Tasmania and Australian Poetry. Hobart, University of Tasmania, 1984.

Editor, Australian Poetry 1969. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1969.

Editor, Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer 1915–1963. Canberra, National Library of Australia, 1977.

Editor, Young St. Poets Anthology. Sydney, Wentworth, 1981.

Editor, with Peter Coleman and Lee Shrubb, Quadrant: Twenty Five Years. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1982.

Editor, with Margaret Scott, Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania. Hobart, Tasmania, Twelvetrees, 1985.

Editor, Australian Poetry 1986 [1988]: The Finest of Recent Australian Poetry. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 2 vols., 1986–88.

Editor, Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal "Fourteen Years," Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1988.

Editor, Sydney's Poems. Sydney, Primavera Press, 1992.

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Manuscript Collections: Australian National Library, Canberra; Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra.

Critical Studies: "The Poetry of The Other Meaning " by Margaret Irvin, in Poetry (Sydney), February 1969; Bread and Wine by Kenneth Slessor, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1970; Commonwealth Literature by William Walsh, London, Oxford University Press, 1973; A Map of Australian Verse by James McAuley, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1976; "Two Poets" by Elaine Lindsay, in Twenty-Four Hours (Sydney), January 1979; Modern Australian Poetry 1920–1970 by Herbert C. Jaffa, Detroit, Gale, 1979; "A Style That Needs No Change: Vivian Smith's Tide Country " by Les A. Murray, in Catholic Weekly (Surrey Hills, New South Wales), 26 December 1982; "The Lyrical Poetry of Vivian Smith" by Elizabeth Perkins, in Quadrant (Sydney), March 1983; "Individualism and Diversity: A Tasmanian Fosterage" by Margaret Scott, in Island Magazine (Sandy Bay, Tasmania), 15, winter 1983; "The Poetry of Vivian Smith" by Michael Haig, in The Age (Melbourne), 5(7), November 1985; "Patience and Surprise: The Poetry of Vivian Smith" by Neil Rowe, in Southerly (Surrey Hills, New South Wales), 2, 1986; "And Here They Rest in Place" by Jennifer Strauss, in Overland (Mt. Eliza, Victoria), 103, 1986; "The Poetry of Vivian Smith" by Carmel Gaffney, in Quadrant (Sydney), July 1989; by Gary Catalano, in Quadrant (France), 39(12), December 1995; "Still Life: Art and Nature in Vivian Smith's Poetry" by David McCooey, in Australian Literary Studies (St. Lucia, Queensland), 17(2), October 1995; Vivian Smith issue of Southerly (Surrey Hills, New South Wales), 56(2), winter 1996.

Vivian Smith comments:

(1980) Within the context of Australian poetry I am, I suppose, something of a regionalist, since most of my poems are about Hobart and Tasmania, though Sydney too has been one of the poles of my inspiration. I write in free and traditional forms, and my lyrics try to affirm both the sense of a personal inner world and the inescapable presence of the actual. There are two areas of influence in my work. The first is that of the Australian poets who most impressed me when I first started to write, particularly Judith Wright and Kenneth Slessor with their focus on landscape and especially the sea, an inescapable element for a Tasmanian. The second is that of the French and German poets whose work I studied closely and lectured on for many years. Although I have lived in Sydney for the last 12 years, Tasmania, with its special qualities of light, vegetation, and landscape, is still the focal point of my work, and I have tried to capture something of its peculiar essence, which is colonial, Europeanized, astringent, secluded, peaceful, and wild. Hobart still seems to me more like a European town or city than any other place in Australia and the most beautiful of all the capital cities.

Looking back over my poems, I find that they are concerned with various attitudes of mind, how to go on living fully and humanly without dogma or theory but without becoming a victim of unstructured experience. In other words, they are concerned with the nature and meaning of belief.

(1990) The above still seems to me to be an accurate statement about aspects of my work, though critics are now writing about its universal and philosophical qualities rather than its regionalism or its earlier preoccupation with history and landscape.

(1995) My new poems have been increasingly concerned with the scrutiny of modes and codes of behavior, the odd, the unexpectedly poignant, observed in the animal as well as the human world ("Dung Beetles," "At the Parrot House," "Taronga Park"). The language has become grittier, the rhythmic structure more complex. New Selected Poems contains a series of prose poems of memories of Hobart in the 1940s as well as many unrhymed free forms. I am aiming all the time for control and intensity.

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In Australia in the 1950s there appeared to be a blossoming of young, fresh poetic talent, predominantly regional in origin: David Rowbotham in Queensland, Randolph Stow in Western Australia, and, in Tasmania, Christopher Koch and Vivian Smith. In his first volume, The Other Meaning, Smith showed a sensitive response to his environment. The "other meaning" he sought was some aspect of the transient that gave it either definition or awareness.

In An Island South the influence of the then predominantly academic poets of dry wit in England and America is more apparent, but since that volume Smith has published only occasional poems. His work has a reticence that sometimes underplays the deftness of observation and precision of control that give his best work a true luminosity. Though his themes have tended to remain persistently close to immediate response, he has appreciably hardened the texture of his poems to a gemlike precision. If he does not appear to have justified the early anticipations of his admirers, his work has grown in its own terms and with honesty and quiet dignity.

Tide Country, which was awarded the important Grace Leven poetry prize in 1982, shows Smith's work at its most assured. The poetry is precise and well controlled, yet capable of an eloquence less reliant upon its lyric forms than the poet's intensity of response to his chosen material, which remains close to observed experience transformed by mature insight and a vast reservoir of cultural values. New Selected Poems, published in 1994, demonstrates no great changes but gathers together later poems from occasional journals and other sources.

—Thomas W. Shapcott