In his 155-page essay on Australian poetry in The Oxford History of Australian Literature, Vivian Smith modestly makes only one passing reference to his own work, noting that he, with a number of other modern poets, had been influenced by university education.

It is likely that a more independent commentator would have given a little more space to the contribution of Vivian Smith, placing him among the finest Australian poets of his generation. Such a conclusion would surely have been confirmed by the appearance of this collection of his poems, rather imprecisely called ‘new’, since only the last of the six sections contains work that had not previously been published in book form.