Peter Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Collected Poems' by Les Murray
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 ...
... (read more)Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Hitler and Film: The Führer’s hidden passion' by Bill Niven
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 ...
... (read more)State Editor's Introduction by Peter Goldsworthy | States of Poetry SA - Series Two
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 a ...
Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Miłosz: A biography' by Andrzej Franaszek, edited and translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker
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 ...
... (read more)Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Play All: A bingewatcher's notebook' by Clive James
‘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 ...
... (read more)Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Chorale at the Crossing' by Peter Porter
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- ...
Philip Harvey reviews 'The Rise of the Machines and other love poems' by Peter Goldsworthy
Speaking of the un-
spoken, jokes are a smoky
subspecies
This near-haiku is not so much a final definition of jokes as one definition of poetry. It shows up in Peter Goldsworthy's sequence 'Ars Poetica'. What he means is that the wordplay of jokes we make every day is a microcosm, a type and model of the more grandiose verbal surp ...
States of Poetry 2016 - South Australia | State Editor's Introduction by Peter Goldsworthy
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, performa ...
Peter Goldsworthy reviews 'Sentenced to Life' by Clive James
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 fro ...
Kári Gíslason reviews 'His Stupid Boyhood: A memoir' by Peter Goldsworthy
Italo Calvino once observed that the ideal condition for a writer is ‘close to anonymity’, adding that ‘the more the author’s figure invades the field, the more the world he portrays empties’. These comments about anonymity were made during an interview on Swiss television, no less. Calvino must have felt his imaginary worlds slipping away as he spoke ...
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