© 2011 Bridge Foundation Inc

 

A review of  This is Serious in “Voice” A Journal of comment and review, by Bill Tully.

 

Ian Smith is a widely published poet from Bairnsdale.   The illustrator of his This is Serious collection, Chanin Thantawiwattana, is doing time at a correctional centre and studying visual arts.  His drawings are pert and very decorative to the text.  The profits from the book go to The Bridge Foundation a local support group for prisoners on release.  The book is divided into five sections: Past, Present, Prose, Places and Parts.  The title is apt and the title poem limns both the muse of and key to the author:

 

Nightfall.  Wind outside, cold air crying.

A poem blind turns round his brain,

tantalising, a woman is talking

He knows he should pay attention

but words don’t always reach out.

She’s told him something hard about them.

He should touch her, smile, make it up.

He needs a pen.  This is serious.

 

Pellucid words where the personal is transformed into more than the process of creative writing (as in ‘Serious’) is only one technique.  The words can be dramatice, demotic and angry as in ‘The Prison Surveys’ spoken by a young inmate”

 

I don’t know.  If I was raped I might not talk.

I suspect we’re more open about drug use.

I mean, there was a study done in NSW…

Yes!  You know about that?

Eight of every thirty prisoners

Were sexually assaulted….

 

Then there is a cycle of five poems involving one ‘Ambrose’, including a twenty-stanza epic.

‘Quest’, and the elegiac ‘The Whisky Voyages’ in twenty-five lines.

 

Mostly, Ian C. Smith uses free verse in varied line patterns with economy and plainness.  He is

neither a glib versifier to be read quickly, nor an earnest stoic to be shunned.  He has much to say and the poetic craft with which to say it.