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Geoff Page
Geoff Page is based in Canberra. His books include 1953 (UQP 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013), Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press 2014), Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry 2015), Hard Horizons (Pitt Street Poetry 2017) and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography (UWA Publishing 2016). He also edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015 (Black Inc). His most recent books are in medias res (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019) and Codicil (Flying Islands Press, 2020)
Flags
January 26
The honours list has been announced,recipients are ‘humbled’.Three jet fighters, adolescent,
fly past proving nothing.Fireworks later on are promised.None of this requires
my serious attention.How many million barbecues?Our tall ships and our
sixty thousand yearsattempt a sort of balancealong with sundry new arrivals
delivered without fussby fishing boat or planeand livi ... (read more)
Patriotism
‘... the last refuge of a scoundrel’. Samuel Johnson
But here and there a whisk of itdoes no essential harm:
an accidental win or twoin sports you never follow,
a minor decency ... (read more)
No name or rank supplied
We’re looking down the barrel ofa.303 Lee Enfield,standard issue through until
the early 1960s.The others in the firing squadhave all been cropped away, it seems.
He is an officer, we think –that small, smart cap betrays him.His hair’s well-trimmed and business-like;
he seems somehow unduly cleanto be an executioner.The scene, most likely, is in England,
followi ... (read more)
Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose's ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia's colonial origins.
... (read more)
Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose's ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia's colonial origins.
To create his eleven-part tribute, Rose has assembled The Earshift Orchestra, an ensemble of seventeen musicians, nearly all o ... (read more)
Although William Carlos Williams, with some accuracy, claimed that ‘every’ poem is an ‘experiment’, the number of successful experiments is relatively rare. Jordie Albiston’s new ‘long poem’ or ‘verse novel’ (call it what you will) is triumphantly experimental in both technique and content.
In technique, Albiston has done several things which, in other hands, would almost certai ... (read more)
A small town in the 1940s. We're paused here, slightly sweating, on a route march from the future. The houses are all wearing down, decrepit from a failed decade, and yet their window glass is polished. I recognise each house in detail, can almost name the families, but know too what the years have wrought. This one, that one. Weatherboard or brick or fibro, torn down in a day or two. A sort of ma ... (read more)
Halfway through her first full-length collection, Babel Fish, Jillian Pattinson quotes Borges's famous argument: 'Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.' Her whole book does its best to embody this idea.
As its title 'Waterline' implies, the first group of poems here is loosely unified by water references, from the semi-scientific language of 'Communion' through to the T.S. ... (read more)
Kevin Hart was born in London in 1954, grew up in Brisbane, and worked in Melbourne before moving to the United States, where he still teaches (currently at the University of Virginia). Although he has won extravagant praise from Americans such as Charles Simić and Harold Bloom, he remains, to Australian readers, an Australian poet. This ‘new and selected’ from a university where he once taug ... (read more)