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Geoffrey Dutton

Geoffrey Dutton (1922–98) – author, publisher, historian – wrote or edited more than 200 books and was a co-founder of Australian Book Review in 1961.

Geoffrey Dutton reviews 'Collected Poems' by Judith Wright

September 1994, no. 164 01 September 1994
In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation. Reading them again today, in her Collected Poems, pleasure is not diminished by familiarity. The 4 ... (read more)

Geoffrey Dutton reviews 'A Body of Water' by Beverley Farmer

April 1990, no. 119 01 April 1990
In this new book, Beverley Farmer quotes George Steiner: ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device.’ The blurb calls A Body of Water a montage. Well, it’s a difficult book to describe. It’s not a pasting together, there’s no smell of glue about it. Nor is it put together, plonk, thunk, like stones. It’s rather, in her own words, an interweaving. It incorporates five fin ... (read more)

Geoffrey Dutton reviews 'Grand Days' by Frank Moorhouse

November 1993, no. 156 01 November 1993
The faded but still brave word ‘grand’ in the title of Frank Moorhouse’s new novel gives a signal from another age, the 1920s, when after the war-to-end-all-wars there were grand ideals and grand hotels. It is also fitting that the League of Nations, the setting for the book, should in the 1920s have had its headquarters in Geneva in a former luxury hotel, while its own rather unfortunately ... (read more)

Geoffrey Dutton reviews 'The Glade Within the Grove' by David Foster

February–March 1996, no. 178 01 February 1996
This amazing novel comes in two parts, a 431-page prose Saga, and a 123 page verse Ballad. The whole is held together by a Narrator, who tells the Saga as a gloss on the Ballad, which he found in an old bike shed in an abandoned mailbag. The ballad was written by Orion the Poet, a young man called Timothy Papadirnitriou. The Narrator is a retired postman, D’Arcy D’Oliveres; readers of David Fo ... (read more)