Geoff Page

‘Down with Beauty! Long Live Death!’, a poem by Geoff Page

May 2003, no. 251 • 18 November 2022

‘Down with Beauty! Long Live Death!’ Two gods share a single breath.   Their warriors can all agree on how to circumscribe the free   and are themselves in turn confined by being of the one small mind.   A Muslim and a Catholic phrase may equally distress our days;   the latter from the Spanish war, the former sure the hip’s a whore.   ‘Down with Bea ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Pacific Light' by David Mason

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

Poet, essayist, and librettist David Mason grew up in Washington State, worked for many years in Colorado (where he became the state’s poet laureate) and a couple of years ago moved to Tasmania. Pacific Light, his new collection, is largely about that transition and his getting to know the landscapes and cultures of his new country. While Mason is to be welcomed as an Australian poet (the ackno ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Song of Less' by Joan Fleming and 'Blight Street' by Geoff Goodfellow

May 2022, no. 442 • 24 April 2022

In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick i ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Selected Poems' by David Musgrave

January–February 2022, no. 439 • 22 December 2021

It is disconcerting how the author of seven poetry collections can ambush the normally attentive reader of Australian poetry with such a forceful body of work as David Musgrave’s Selected Poems, which runs to more than two hundred pages. Musgrave’s individual collections have appeared with various publishers over the years since To Thalia back in 2004, but insufficient attention has been paid ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Poems: Seven ages' by Barbara Giles

December 1997–January 1998, no. 197 • 01 December 1997

It is a truism that poets don’t need to write their autobiography. Roland Barthes, with his ‘death of the author’, may have thought otherwise but in Barbara Giles’ new book, Poems: Seven Ages, published in her eighty-seventh year, there is no mistaking the autobiographical core. Though neither the title nor the blurb suggests it, Poems: Seven Ages is really a ‘selected’. Giles has gon ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Letters from the Periphery' by Alex Skovron

October 2021, no. 436 • 23 September 2021

To those who have followed Alex Skovron’s poetry since The Rearrangement (1988), it’s not a surprise to learn that he has been the general editor of an encyclopedia, a book editor, a lover of classical music and chess, an occasional translator of Dante and Borges, and the author of six well-spaced poetry collections, a stylish novella, and a collection of short stories. He can often seem the v ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century World Poetry' edited by Mark Willhardt and Alan Michael Parker

May 2003, no. 251 • 01 May 2003

In his foreword to this reference work, Andrew Motion says that such books ‘exist to provoke argument’. In their preface, editors Willhardt and Parker suggest that ‘to compile such a volume as this may seem absurd; to do so successfully may be impossible’. Forewarned is forearmed, it would seem. Despite all this, the book is useful – about the only adjective to which a reference work sh ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'A Paddock in His Head' by Brendan Ryan

October 2007, no. 295 • 01 October 2007

There has been something of a fashion in recent years to dismiss what might loosely be called ‘rural’ poetry because the vast majority of Australians live in cities near the coast. Nevertheless, ‘rural’ poetry keeps appearing, and not just in the works of Les Murray. A considerable number of Australian poets are only one generation away from the land (even John Tranter was born in Cooma), ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'The Strangest Place: New and selected poems' by Stephen Edgar

March 2021, no. 429 • 22 February 2021

Stephen Edgar, over the past two decades or so, has earned himself an assured place in contemporary Australian poetry (even in English-language poetry more generally) as its pre-eminent and most consistent formalist. His seemingly effortless poems appear in substantial overseas journals, reminding readers that rhyme and traditional metre have definitely not outlived their usefulness. Edgar’s Th ... (read more)

Geoff Page reviews 'Space: New Writing, No. 3' edited by Anthony Lynch and David McCooey and 'Island 105' edited by Gina Mercer

October 2006, no. 285 • 01 October 2006

The American poet William Carlos Williams often admitted how much he owed to the ‘little magazines’ that first published him. As they lapsed in and out of existence, he regarded them all as essentially the one publication and was grateful for the lifeblood they gave his (at first unpopular) writing. It is to be hoped that Australian literary magazines of various political shades and aesthetic ... (read more)