© 2011 Bridge Foundation Inc

Memory like hunger is Smith's latest collection of poetry. He has published two earlier anthologies. The poetry of broken relationships and to some extent broken dreams dominates this particular collection. This is poetry about separation and loss and the memory of better times. It sifts through ordinary, suburban heartaches and takes an anti-romantic stance.

The poem 'Don Juan undone' concerns the mortality of the high romantics Shelley and Byron, showing them as mere mortals, with brief, scattered lives and deaths. Smith's poetry looks back to his youth in the fifties and sixties, longing to recapture its idealism and remembering people's heroes like footballers and the boxer Sonny Liston.

Smith is an accomplished poet Interestingly, in this collection, he writes from a variety of perspectives: male, female, old, young. His skills are strong here, showing the depth of the poet's under­standing of human nature. Equally, I would like to have seen as great a technical diversity in the collection's style and meter, as some poems were a little too similar. Smith also has the disconcerting habit of throwing in the odd rhyming couplet here and there. But a number of fine poems, such as 'Don Juan undone', 'Dorman engineering 1970' and 'Word addict' show Smith does have good technical skills.

In Memory like hunger, some of the poems are actually prose pieces either written as prose or oddly, broken up as pseudo poems, lacking proper meter. These pieces, well written in themselves, are not poems. Their presence in this anthology made me wonder whether Smith is a poet in transition, either moving to prose or seeking to radically change his poetic style.

For me, the best poem in the anthology was 'Police informer's last rites. This is not one of the poems about heartache but rather an excellent piece of paranoia and immediacy, capturing the life and death of a hunted man. The poem is a kind of modern sonnet and in this instance the rhymed couplets at the end of each verse do not jar because they fit properly into the style and meter of the poem. The eye glides over them and they help to keep the poem tight and tense.

Memory like hunger was published in collaboration with the Bridge Foundation, a small community agency which works to support ex-prisoners in the Gippsland area. Proceeds from the sales of this anthology go to support the work of the foundation.