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Agnostic Skies by Geoff Page

by
February 2007, no. 288

Agnostic Skies by Geoff Page

Five Islands Press, $18.95 pb, 74 pp

Agnostic Skies by Geoff Page

by
February 2007, no. 288

Geoff Page’s latest poetry collection is a wide-ranging survey of some of the issues affecting contemporary Australian life. Underpinning Page’s poems of cafés, apartments, classical music, outback murders and domestic violence is a meditation on approaching mortality and the very idea of belief. In Page’s previous collection, Darker and Lighter (2001), the troubling nature of belief was hinted at in ‘Credo’: ‘The dark-night-of-the-soul-agnostic / prefers the right to doubt. / The world’s too much beset by those / who know what they’re about.’ Five years later, Page’s reflections on belief and the loss thereof return like echoes from a bell. In the fine poem ‘At Tosolini’s’, Page contrasts the diners’ penchant for coffee with the sound of bells ringing at a nearby church: ‘The sound of bells in autumn air / has long since been a thing / that we can never quite believe / and yet we don’t despair.’ Page’s use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ assumes much, and perhaps speaks for those who no longer believe.

Brendan Ryan reviews 'Agnostic Skies' by Geoff Page

Agnostic Skies

by Geoff Page

Five Islands Press, $18.95 pb, 74 pp

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