Along the Line: (Salt Modern Poets)

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.

Table 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. He lectured in the French Department of the University of Tasmania until 1967 when he moved to Sydney to become a Reader in the Department of English, University of Sydney. After a distinguished career as an academic, he retired in 1996. He is a highly respected critic, having produced key studies on Australian literature and contributed much to the growth and sophistication of criticism surrounding Australian poetry. From 1975 to 1990 he was the literary editor of Quadrant. Smith’s first book of poetry, The Other Meaning, was published in 1956 and he has since published seven further collections, among which Tide Country won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the Grace Leven Prize.