Pitt Street Poetry is a fine and well-established poetry publisher. However, its 101 Poets series is a somewhat puzzling phenomenon. It was started in 2016 and, according to the publisher’s website, aimed to be ‘a new series of selected poems … bring[ing] together the best work of Australia’s leading poets as collectable, definitive editions’. Yet, in eight years, it has only included volumes by John Foulcher, Anthony Lawrence, Geoff Page, and Ron Pretty. These are established figures, but they do not constitute a broadly representative sample of Australia’s leading contemporary poets.

Geoff Page’s 101 Poems does not aim to be definitive either, only selecting from seven of his books – those published in the eleven years between 2011 and 2019 – along with some newer poetry. The relatively limited period covered by the volume may be explained by Page’s publication in 2013 of a New Selected Poems with Puncher & Wattmann. Since 2011, he has written verse novels and poetic biographies as well as shorter free-verse poems. Sensibly, this 101 Poems confines itself to shorter works, along with brief selections from 1953, an unorthodox verse novel composed of linked but more-or-less discrete poems suitable for extracting from their original context.