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Geoff Goodfellow

Song of Less by Joan Fleming & Blight Street by Geoff Goodfellow

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May 2022, no. 442

In the years since Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets (1986), the verse novel has become, despite its inherent difficulties, an established literary form in Australian poetry (and fiction, for that matter). Verse novelist Dorothy Porter (1954–2008), with The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and other works, gave it further prominence. Steven Herrick is just one of the poets who are making it an important part of the Young Adult field. A series of interviews with Australasian verse novelists (The Verse Novel), edited by Linda Weste, has recently gone into a second edition.

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Geoff Goodfellow is best known as a poet. Out of Copley Street, his first non-verse publication, chronicles his working-class coming of age in Adelaide’s inner-northern suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s.

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In 2004 Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher, began to experience a cluster of mysterious symptoms. Bruises appeared and vanished ‘like stigmata’, and a numb headache and sudden exhaustion suggested that something was ‘terribly wrong’. Her pains were ghostly and mobile. When her doctors suggested migraines and prescribed aspirin, she demanded blood tests. She received a call to come back for more tests, and still recalls the urgency in the nurse’s voice. ‘Come now,’ Reed remembers her saying. ‘Come now.’

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Punch On Punch Off by Geoff Goodfellow & Fontanelle by Andrew Lansdown

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May 2005, no. 271

These two new collections are both by, and maybe for, believers. They contain passionate and interrogative poems that argue for and celebrate their respective views of the world. Both poets are, to quote Rosemary Sorensen’s term for Goodfellow on the cover blurb, ‘evangelists’ who wear their respective hearts on their sleeves and who urge or invite assent.

Fontanelle, Andrew Lansdown’s seventh collection, is concerned with the almost ineffable immanent design and intricacy of the natural and experienced world, especially of birds, insects and a young family. The role of the poet here is to explore, describe and celebrate the (almost) sacred in the mundane: ‘The words I’ve been working with / are like running water. All afternoon / I’ve been trying to scoop out / a place for them to settle …’ (‘Home’). Lansdown’s voice is earnest, reverent, wonderstruck. These are Romantic imagist poems in which the poetry defers to the empirical and ontological world: ‘Cicadas have left their cuticles / clinging to the daisy stems: / brown shells, burst at the back / of the thorax’ (‘Emergence’).

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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 Good­fellow writes in ‘Skin Deep’, a women’s prison poem:

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