Peter Goldsworthy

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'The Book of My Enemy: Collected verse 1958–2003' by Clive James

March 2004, no. 259 • 01 March 2004

Someone once described Clive James as ‘a great bunch of guys’, a joke worthy of James himself, although he is probably tired of hearing it. Some of those guys – the television comedian and commentator, the best-selling memoirist – are better known than others, and there’s little doubt that their fame has obscured the achievement of two of the quieter guys in the bunch. One of these is a ... (read more)

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Collected Poems' by Les Murray

December 2018, no. 407 • 26 November 2018

A seven-hundred-page Collected Poems? The cover photograph of the Big Bloke himself is an embodiment of what’s inside in all its sprawling abundance. As is his surname, which can’t help but invoke our country’s big river, whether in full flood, or slow trickle, or slow spreading billabongs. The first Les Murray poem I read was more a chain of ponds: the long sequence Walking to the Cattle P ... (read more)

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Hitler and Film: The Führer’s hidden passion' by Bill Niven

June-July 2018, no. 402 • 25 May 2018

History is written by the Oscar winners in our time, which makes the responsibilities of serious historical scholarship never more important. Despite its realist pretensions – it looks as real as life – film is a dreamy, poetic medium, too often prone to simplicity, conspiracy theory, sucking up to the Zeitgeist – and, above all, not letting messy facts spoil a ripping story. Hitler won no ... (read more)

State Editor's Introduction by Peter Goldsworthy | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

States of Poetry South Australia - Series Two • 16 February 2018

Steve Brock began writing in the shadow of the New York school, but in ‘dreaming with Ted Berrigan’ – ‘I can’t remember if he said anything’ – might be saying goodbye to those earlier cool dudes and already anticipating the more variable temperature of South American poetry. He has spent a lot of time in Chile especially, and has translated extensively from the Spanish. Of course, La ... (read more)

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Miłosz: A biography' by Andrzej Franaszek, edited and translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker

January–February 2018, no. 398 • 22 December 2017

About halfway through this thick biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz (and halfway through the century of horrors that his life experiences uncannily track and are witness to) came a passage that stopped me dead. In the spring of 1943, on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw, standing on the balcony, we could hear screaming from the ghetto. The ... (read more)

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Play All: A bingewatcher's notebook' by Clive James

November 2016, no. 386 • 26 October 2016

‘You might ask how a man who spent his days with the major poems of Browning could wish to spend his evenings with the minor movies of Chow Yun-fat,’ Clive James asks, rhetorically, in Play All: A bingewatcher’s notebook, then provides a near-tautological answer: ‘It’s a duplex need buried deep in my neural network.’ In mine, too, although my love of screen trash comes from childhood d ... (read more)

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Chorale at the Crossing' by Peter Porter

May 2016, no. 381 • 26 April 2016

Peter Porter's posthumous collection of poems, Chorale at the Crossing, is preoccupied, understandably, with death – but death was a central preoccupation of his work from the beginning. How could it not be? He lost his mother at the age of nine. Porter's two Collected Poems (1983 and 1999) were – are – stupendous, exuberant treasure-houses of riches, but death is the dark stitching. Death ... (read more)

States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | State Editor's Introduction by Peter Goldsworthy

States of Poetry South Australia - Series One • 22 February 2016

I sometimes think that poetry sits in relation to the great empire of the Novel as precariously as early Christianity in the Roman Empire: small groups of devotees gathering in catacombs to perform their sacred rites. OK, the stakes are not as high (the odd literary lion notwithstanding) and things have changed a little in recent years (new media platforms, performance-based and multi-media readin ... (read more)

Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Sentenced to Life' by Clive James

August 2015, no. 373 • 28 July 2015

Clive James’s series of memoirs began in 1980 with the Unreliable one. Thirty-five years and four more very funny books later, the Five Lives of Clive have been rounded with a sixth: a slim volume of poems. It is probably also the most reliable, as if, paradoxically, James took more poetic licence when working in prose. The prevailing tone is a long way from the hilarious self-deprecation of the ... (read more)

'Dr Goldsworthy on Dr Chekhov' by Peter Goldsworthy

March 2011, no. 329 • 12 April 2011

‘Who do you think you are?’ an eminent paediatrician once thundered at me across a child’s cot during his weekly grand ward round. ‘Anton Chekhov?’ I was a lowly medical student; my white student-smock had a small front pocket meant for my doctoring tools; mine contained, a little ostentatiously, a book of poems instead. I had failed to answer a question correctly. His Eminence plucked ... (read more)