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No Collars No Cuffs, plenty of fisticuffs, and you’ll probably get K.O.’d by all this, after a round or two of three or four poems each. You may need someone in your corner to bolster you, for as Geoff Good&shy;fellow writes in ‘Skin Deep’, a women’s prison poem: Prison lawns are manicured rose bushes pruneda photographer’s dream but insideplaster & lives{all apart& the women know even cosmeticsneed foundations The first nine poems concern themselves with the poet’s childhood. He grew up in a street full of ‘post-war kids / 3 brothers/bunk bed&shy;ded as the rest / evenly spread / with grey army blankets / blue striped / to match our eyes’. He was as he says a bastard of a kid. His recollections, far from being nostalgic, stringently reflect the goings on in the late fifties and sixties. These are personal poems but their content universally depicts a boy’s world. Goodfellow’s poems thump out a rocky or blues rhythm. It is first rate performance poetry, and no one can read them better than the poet himself. His is an extremely hard act to follow as I was to find out at Montsalvat in 1984. I was next on the programme! But these are also poems of great discernment and subtlety. The subtlety flexes with the meat of experience. To feel their full force, belt them out your&shy;self, in the shower, the pub, or at a sedate tea party. The second of the four sections in this book looks at the pub scene. In ‘Crowd Control’, the bouncer controls the owner, barmen, barmaids, cook and customers – the customer with the compressed cheek bone calls him/Sir/now/the police/Mister/ others/out of earshot/call him a luna&shy;tic/others/out of hours/call him on the phone/where they can’t be reached’. And if you’re a trendy, don’t read ‘No Trendies’ – ‘just a Besser Block pub/no pretension/no frills/& no bullshit/built thirty years back/by blokes with crew cuts/square necks & Brylcreem’, and the patrons ‘talk pipe dreams of/a Moomba job/take trips & speed/from a barstool/ reckon rent reliefs more/regular than a girlfriend.’ This section and the next called ‘Bending Bars’, and dealing with the prison scene are the best two in the book. Goodfellow has extensively conducted workshops, and given readings in prisons. The poet does not moralise the many social aspects he deals with. The facts are presented as they are, hard, cold, sordid and bloody. Prison is a place where ‘men turn boys into men or women . . . & the Sunday joint/means a roast if you’re sprung’. Where there is humour it is wry, and cleverly turned against the system and circumstances which proliferate the problems. Only in one poem can I find a moral or ethical overtone, which I cannot disagree with. From ‘People in Glass Houses’ - people/like glasses/are fragile/should be handled with care/some clear/some cracked some/with a chip on the shoulder/yet however washe4d up they are/handled the right way/with allowances for flaws/they don’t/have to be destroyed.’ Along with Eric Beach and Jenny Bault, Geoff Goodfellow is one of the most unpretentious and hard-hitting poets writing today. Congratulations to Friendly Street Poets on their daring ver&shy;satility. The Bay of Salamis and Other Poems by John Bray is as different from No Collars No Cuffs, as the Leaning Tower of Pisa is from the M.C.G. The young reader may find this book laborious and antiquated. The older academic will probably relish it; it is dedicated to A. D. Hope. I find myself mid&shy;stream. The poems are traditional and rhyming. John Bray is now 74 years old, was Chief Justice of South Australia, and certainly the ‘law’ and the ‘poet’ is an interesting combo. But the man is a humanist and will hit out at life, at injustice, in no small way. He can laugh at himself, at his ill-health and his doctor’s order. There are two large sections in the book devoted to translations and adaptations from the Greek mythology and other sources. In the first section ‘Poems’ (his own) he covers such diverse subjects as, tobacco and its virtues, kings and doctors, meditation on a lost tooth, viruses, plum trees, changes in government, and not un&shy;expectedly law and justice. In a poem ‘Trousered Apes’ - an old theme but well handled, we find ‘Animals within their own species refrain from rape, sadism/murder and torture’. And if a baboon began to behave like Jack the Ripper, Manson or Hitler, The other baboons would say, whiletaking swift stepsto suppress him,Rainbow-Arse is no better than a dog-muzzled bare-bottomed hominoid.His recent behaviour we class as revoltingly humanistic. How true, and I like it. I give no great pluses or minuses for this one, but I intend to look up old Antiphanes. I may find some&shy;thing new

Mal Morgan

From the New Issue

Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice by Anne Manne

Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93) by Lech Blaine

Letters to the Editor - May 2024

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