Graeme KinrossSmith

Facing the first poem in Graeme Kinross-Smith’s new book Available Light is a quote from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead (2002): ‘The mere act of writing splits the self in two.’ When you write, not only are you a writer, but you are your own first and very present reader. Suddenly, all alone at your desk, you have company. The first section of Kinross-Smith’s book focuses not so much on the act of writing as on the split self. In poems such as ‘In my wheat-bag hood’, ‘Commas’, ‘if I be not I …’ he observes possible past selves and his future. ‘Commas’ uses the metaphor of a man skimming stones across a pool:

Graeme Kinross-Smith, the author of Long Afternoon of the World, is a prolific writer, perhaps best known for his poetry – and it shows. This narrative is infused with the poetry of landscape and the joy of music: ‘Down the rooms of the past I hear music ... Music informs landscapes, the patient streets, the city’s lights spreading across the hills.’ The world of Tim Menzies comes alive on the page, and it is quintessentially Victorian. He recalls the Melbourne of his childhood, ‘shop and vacant block, rare beach, street games, lumbering planes in the sky that sound like the War’; present-day Melbourne, ‘its relentless, tired, opportunist rhythm’, and the family farms in the Mallee and the Wimmera. Most of all, Tim’s mind lingers on the wild coast of western Victoria, where he meditates and writes in an old church. The seascapes, as well as the notion of the healing power of the sea, account for some of the most lyrical passages in Long Afternoon.

Normally, Australia’s Writers could be expected to attract the special attention of critics. However, by sensible use of his preface and the quality of his book’s contents, Graeme Kinross Smith has minimised the possibility of adverse comment. Carefully, he sets out the guidelines adopted for the fifty­four essays that range from two to ten pages each, starting with Captain Arthur Phillip and closing with Rosemary Dobson. Stressing ‘the distinctive and fascinating’ tradition of Australian literature and the book’s purpose in giving an insight into that tradition, Graeme Kinross Smith writes: