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This new book of Vivian Smith’s is really quite a surprise. If it were the case of any other poet approaching his eighties you might think of it as rather a grab bag, knocked together out of odds and ends. It is made up of an imaginary biography of ‘Ern Malley’; another set of sonnets, ‘Diary Without Dates’, mainly dealing with momentary meetings; a small group of sonnets imagined as postcards; and two prose pieces: one remembering the 1953 exhibition of French paintings in Hobart, and the other recording visits to Pablo Neruda’s three houses.
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