Geoff Page
Geoff Page is based in Canberra. His books include 1953 (UQP 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013), Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press 2014), Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry 2015), Hard Horizons (Pitt Street Poetry 2017) and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography (UWA Publishing 2016). He also edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015 (Black Inc). His most recent books are in medias res (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019) and Codicil (Flying Islands Press, 2020)
The need for this book is self-evident in a way that a similarly historical anthology for New South Wales or Victorian poetry would not be. From many perspectives, Perth is one of the most remote cities in the world and there is no doubt that the state’s uniqueness is captured in this extensive, though tightly edited, selection. Despite its comparable treatment of Aboriginal people, Western Aust ... (read more)
The Notebooks
Thirty years of dreams are storedin notebooks, written down on waking.
Her daughter’s kept them all,imagining her mother moves
among those shimmering and scribbledlayers on a bedside table.
Those narratives live on, she’s sure,in all their raw hallucinations,
their sudden runs of ecstasy,their weird humiliations.
Yet from her own the daughter knowshow quickly dreams dispers ... (read more)
Judgement
If all we’re told is righthow wearisome He’ll find it;all those fine gradations,
those mitigating factors.Psychopaths are easybut who are we to say?
The virtuous are harder,their sin of subtle pride,their svelte self-satisfaction.
The normal are the worst,one day a fine donation,next day a little nip,
a joke that cuts too deep,some small misuse of power.And then, just one day on ... (read more)
Flags
January 26
The honours list has been announced,recipients are ‘humbled’.Three jet fighters, adolescent,
fly past proving nothing.Fireworks later on are promised.None of this requires
my serious attention.How many million barbecues?Our tall ships and our
sixty thousand yearsattempt a sort of balancealong with sundry new arrivals
delivered without fussby fishing boat or planeand livi ... (read more)
Patriotism
‘... the last refuge of a scoundrel’. Samuel Johnson
But here and there a whisk of itdoes no essential harm:
an accidental win or twoin sports you never follow,
a minor decency ... (read more)
No name or rank supplied
We’re looking down the barrel ofa.303 Lee Enfield,standard issue through until
the early 1960s.The others in the firing squadhave all been cropped away, it seems.
He is an officer, we think –that small, smart cap betrays him.His hair’s well-trimmed and business-like;
he seems somehow unduly cleanto be an executioner.The scene, most likely, is in England,
followi ... (read more)
Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose's ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia's colonial origins.
... (read more)
Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose's ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia's colonial origins.
To create his eleven-part tribute, Rose has assembled The Earshift Orchestra, an ensemble of seventeen musicians, nearly all o ... (read more)
Although William Carlos Williams, with some accuracy, claimed that ‘every’ poem is an ‘experiment’, the number of successful experiments is relatively rare. Jordie Albiston’s new ‘long poem’ or ‘verse novel’ (call it what you will) is triumphantly experimental in both technique and content.
In technique, Albiston has done several things which, in other hands, would almost certai ... (read more)
