– From The Mill Road
STORY PAGE
Midway through high school, and longing for something I couldn’t name, I first heard the words of Shakespeare. ‘Yonder marble skyline,’ broke my heart and made it new, and opened up worlds of possibility.
The gift of language Shakespeare and others—Hopkins, Keats, Donne and Dylan—gave could tell love and jealousy, kindness and pain, in ways I hadn’t known, in ways that rumoured elusive truths. ‘We are creatures whose volatile inner lives are both mysterious to us and beyond our control,’ according to Gregory Orr in Poetry as Survival.
Seamus Heaney suggests poetry allows us to ‘make a raid on the inarticulate’. Poetry can be a lens one views the world through. It sharpens our focus, and allows us to sense that which can’t be told. ‘Rational cognition has one critical limit which is its inability to cope with suffering. Reason can subsume suffering under concepts; it can furnish means to alleviate suffering; but it can never express suffering in the medium of experience, for to do so would be irrational by reason’s own standards,’ so wrote Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory.
‘Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.’
—Novalis
Poetry can be a tool, too—a unique tool—for a deeper exploration of one’s self, of a life lived without rehearsal. It can (sometimes) give us the power to see that which is often missed, what’s right in front of us, and so allows us to celebrate the extraordinary in the everyday. ‘Use the commonplace to escape the commonplace,’ says Buson.
‘Without poetry we lose our way.’
—Joy Harjo
Someone once suggested that by the time we’re seven years old we have enough to write about for the rest of our lives. And mostly what that is, is memory—a verb—that never stops refashioning what has passed.
‘And in my memory too I meet myself.’
—St Augustine, Confessions
“ Kevin Smith’s … 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
For the last nineteen years, I have lived with my partner on thirty-five acres of the Blackall Range outside Maleny, Queensland.
Over a century ago, the rainforest was logged for its hardwoods. By the early 1920s it was almost completely denuded. We’ve work to revegetate the bush, to provide habitat the birds and animals can come back into, while trying to build a connection with the wildness of the world.
We acknowledge the Gubbi Gubbi and Jinibara people, as traditional owners of the country on which we live, the Sovereignty of which was never ceded.
Publishing
‘Afterwards’ and ‘A Day Spent’
2023 University of Canberra VC Poetry Prize Anthology
‘Elsewhere in the Universe’, ‘On Station Creek’ and ‘Port-a-Cath’
2023 ACU Poetry Prize Anthology
Love, AUSTRALIA
‘Roofer’
2022 ACU Poetry Prize Anthology,
Hope, AUSTRALIA
‘A Morning Running Late’
2022 ACU Poetry Prize Anthology,
Hope, AUSTRALIA
‘She, The Boy Monk’
2021 ACU Poetry Prize Anthology, Resilience, AUSTRALIA
‘Rising Tide’
2021 ACU Poetry Prize Anthology, Resilience, AUSTRALIA
‘At the Cancer Retreat’
2020 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology,
Grieve, AUSTRALIA
‘Thirteen Ways of Knowing My Father’
2018 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Buying On Line, AUSTRALIA
‘The Mill Road’
2018 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Buying On Line, AUSTRALIA
‘Bull’
2013 Aesthetica Poetry Anthology,
Annual Writing Annual, ENGLAND
‘No Southern Boobook’
2013 Penumbra Poetry Contest Anthology,
Seven Hills Review, USA
‘Death in the Afternoon’
2013 Poetic Republic ebook,
ENGLAND.
'Crows’
2013 Poetic Republic ebook,
ENGLAND
Honours
Runners-up
‘The Diamantina’
2020 Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize,
AUSTRALIA
‘Into the Mist’
2020 Robert Graves Poetry Prize,
ENGLAND.
‘No Southern Boobook’
2012 Penumbra Poetry Contest,
USA.
Special Mention
‘Stallion’
2020 Welsh International Poetry Prize, WALES
‘Watercourses’
2012 Adrien Abbott Poetry Prize, AUSTRALIA
Finalist
‘Bull’
2012 Aesthetica Creative Writing Comp,
ENGLAND
Highly Commended
‘The Woman on the Bus’
2012 Ethel Webb Bundell Literary Awards, AUSTRALIA
‘Bull’
2012 FAWNS Vibrant Verse Poetry Comp, AUSTRALIA.
Commended
‘Thirteen Ways of Knowing My Father’
2018 Newcastle Poetry Prize,
AUSTRALIA
‘A Bedroom in Arles’
2012 All Poetry Competition,
AUSTRALIA
Shortlisted
‘A River Running Shallow’
2023 Bedford Poetry Prize
Bedford, ENGLAND
‘Tree-Feller’
2022 Bridport Poetry Prize
Bridport, ENGLAND
‘Commission Home’
2022 Newcastle Poetry Prize
AUSTRALIA
‘A Morning Running Late’
2022 ACU Poetry Prize
AUSTRALIA
‘Night Heron Under a Crescent Moon’
2021 Fish Poetry Prize,
IRELAND.
Judge — former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins — selected the poem among the best twelve from 2, 987 entries.
‘She, The Boy Monk’
2021 ACU Poetry Prize,
AUSTRALIA
‘Rising Tide’
2021 ACU Poetry Prize,
AUSTRALIA
‘At the Cancer Retreat’
2020 Grieve Poetry Prize,
AUSTRALIA.
‘Bone Collector’
2020 Fish Poetry Prize,
IRELAND
‘Deep-Sea Diver’
2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, ENGLAND
‘The Mill Road’
2018 Newcastle Poetry Prize,
AUSTRALIA
‘The Last Moment’
2012 Fish Poetry Prize,
IRELAND
Long Listed
‘The Toolbox’2023 Fish
Poetry Prize
IRELAND
‘The Black Dog’
2020 Fish Poetry Prize,
IRELAND
‘Death in the Afternoon’
2014 Fish Poetry Prize,
IRELAND.
‘Hilltop Station via Wee Jasper’
2012 Fish Poetry Prize,
IRELAND.