Reviews

I WRITE to commend to you this beautiful book of poems—Awake to the Rest of My Days—by Kevin Smith.

Two of the poems here shortlisted, and one was highly commended, in the 2018 Newcastle Poetry Prize and several others have been awarded and published.  These, as you’ll see, are fine, fine lyric poems, much better made and more wisely imagined than many poems published today. It should win prizes; it will win readers.

I confess to a connection. Kevin took my creative writing masterclass at the University of Sydney in 2017. I recognized his gift (and perceived his need for a little help with rhythm and form) when he shared his first poem in that class. Later, Kevin signed on to a mentorship with me through Australian Writer Mentors. We worked closely on all the poems in this collection. Kevin made a dozen or more new poems during our nine months of working together, and he refined all the others he had already composed. He also asked my advice about the curation of this final selection and the fashioning of the book.

Kevin brings to his poetry a tough country childhood transfigured into an admirable life as a school teacher and writer. These are grown-up poems, and it is his wide reading and lyric ear and dedication to the craft that have in large part grown Kevin up so well he was ready to make these poems. These poems are tender, and they are uncompromising. Literature forgives us for being human, I have often thought, and these poems bear that out. Poverty and violence and drunkenness, which afflicted his childhood home, along with the blessing of maternal love and the consolation of forests, farms, timber mills and wild rivers, are borne kind witness here, without nostalgia or sentimentality. These are post-pastoral poems—elegies, paeans, narratives, lays, songs of innocence and experience. These poems are well-read. They are poems in the tradition of Frank Webb and Jane Kenyon and Charles Wright and Judith Wright. They are without pretension, but they are distinctive in their resonant plainness. 

Kevin Smith catches the lyric of places and carries it to you in vivid imagery, resonant but simple phrasings, and elegant rhythms. He writes sons and lovers and fathers and mothers as if they were places you’d rather be, and he writes landscapes as if they were family. 

You’ll not read better bird poems or landscape portraits. You’ll find childhood here and death. You’ll find grandmothers and grandfathers and daughters at the piano and sons in strife. You’ll find love poems that feel like you lived them in their embarrassment and delight, and heartbreaking poems of dementia and of troubled youth. Poems that confront life-threatening illness. You’ll find airports, and you’ll find paddocks, creeks and beaches and urban streets, and foreign cities and local towns. But what especially shines here are Smith’s poems of fathers (“Thirteen Ways of Knowing my Father”) and sons (“He on the Earth of the Night”), the work of hands (“The Killing,” “The Mill Road”), and the crucible of family life. 

“[C]leverness is not what endures,” wrote Charles Wright. “Only pain endures. And the rhythm of pain.” If “pain” can be taken to mean also exquisite moments, some delightful, some terrible, Kevin Smith could be said to have made poems here that will endure, written as they are in the rhythm of “pain” endured.

These days of when toxic masculinity is everywhere outed, the world may need as many instances of a kinder, wiser masculine aspect of humanity as it can find. Kevin Smith’s poetry is an instance. And we need it. His is a rare voice in Australian poetry—fatherly and brotherly, humble and human, neither glibly ironic nor earnest, neither academical nor naïve, both grave and light at once. These are lovely poems—in sentiment and thought, in image and cadence, in form and phrase, in voicing. In my mind they remind us what poetry is for.

– Mark Tredinnick