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Peter Goldsworthy

Minotaur by Peter Goldsworthy

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August 2019, no. 413
Chris Flynn reviews 'Minotaur' by Peter Goldsworthy

Halfway through Minotaur, Peter Goldsworthy’s jauntily satisfying novel about a sharp-tongued former motorcycle cop blinded by a bullet to the head, Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow gropes his way to a shed behind his Adelaide cottage. Inside lies a partially dismantled 1962 Green Frame Ducati 750SS ...

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Collected Poems by Les Murray

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December 2018, no. 407
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 ...

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Hitler and Film: The Führer’s hidden passion by Bill Niven

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June-July 2018, no. 402
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 ...

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State Editor's Introduction by Peter Goldsworthy | States of Poetry SA - Series Two

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States of Poetry South Australia - 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 ...

Miłosz: A biography by Andrzej Franaszek, edited and translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker

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January–February 2018, no. 398
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 ...

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Play All: A bingewatcher’s notebook by Clive James

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November 2016, no. 386
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 ...

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Chorale at the Crossing by by Peter Porter

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May 2016, no. 381
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- ...

The Rise of the Machines and other love poems by Peter Goldsworthy

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March 2016, no. 379
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

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States of Poetry South Australia - Series One

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 ...

Sentenced to Life by Clive James

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August 2015, no. 373
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 ...

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