Too Close for Comfort

Pip Smith

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Format: paperback
70 pages
ISBN: 9781921364440

Publication: 13 Sep 2013

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Pip Smith's Too Close for Comfort, is the inaugural winner of the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest, a biennial prize for a book of poetry by an Australian female poet which deals in some way with Australian culture. This award (and future awards) has been made possible by a generous bequest from the estate of Helen Anne Bell, a former student at the University of Sydney. The inaugural award in 2013 drew a highly competitive field of entries, but the judges, Joanne Burns, Jill Jones and myself, felt that Pip Smith's poems were the ones which engaged most robustly and imaginatively with Australian life, concerns, and culture in the 21st century.

From the Foreword by Judith Beveridge.

Pip Smith writes songs, poems and stories. She holds a doctorate in creative arts from Western Sydney University and works in a bookshop. Her debut novel Half Wild (Allen & Unwin, 2017) was the winner of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists 2018.

Foreword

Happy Christmas! (don’t get tasered)
Scrooge
This season
Go home australia your drunk!!
Cartography
Midnight Mass
Etymology
Now that’s cricket
Too close for comfort
Broken train lines
Comb jelly
Marrickville cats
How to reason with snakes
An ode to the stupidity of sheep
The little things
Plum tree
Biology

Ghosts make good material

The red disk

Bikies
Watertight

Keeping it real with Kendrick Lamar

On the 36th floor

For Tim
Punch lines
Arrogant ghost
Death metal
Sleeper train
HOWL, for Allen Ginsberg

Acknowledgements

‘Smith’s voice is anything but timid, and it’s when she modulates ‘difficult’ with a more restrained-but-fluent perspicacity that the collection really starts to build its force.’
Antonia Pont Cordite Poetry Review