Geoff Page
Geoff Page reviews 'A Personal History of Vision' by Luke Fischer, 'Flute of Milk' by Susan Fealy', and 'Dark Convicts: Ex-slaves on the First Fleet' by Judy Johnson
The UWAP Poetry imprint began in late 2016, and there are already fourteen titles available. To judge from the quality of the three reviewed here, UWAP’s energy and ambition is well-placed ...
... (read more)ACT | Three poems by Geoff Page
Thursday, 27 April 2017Geoff Page reads his poems 'No name or rank supplied', 'Flags', and 'The Notebooks' for ABR's ACT States of Poetry anthology.
Geoff Page reviews 'The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry' by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan (eds)
The need for this book is self-evident in a way that a similarly historical anthology for New South Wales or Victorian poetry would not be. From many perspectives, Perth is one of the most remote cities in the world and there is no doubt that the state’s uniqueness is captured in this extensive, though tightly edited, selection. Despite its comparable treatment of ...
Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation ...
... (read more)Geoff Page reviews 'Iron in the Blood: A musical adaptation of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore' composed by Jeremy Rose
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 ...
... (read more)Public oratory and prose fiction both need a significant degree of rhythm, but for almost all poetry (including free verse) rhythm is indispensable. Both genres use the 'sound effects' of assonance, alliteration, etc., but verbal music is more important to poetry than to prose.
... (read more)Dennis Haskell reviews 'Dawn the Proof' by Tony Page, 'Headwaters' by Anthony Lawrence, and 'Gods and Uncles' by Geoff Page
The last two lines of Tony Page's Dawn the Proof (Hybrid Publishers, $25 pb, 87 pp, 9781925272239) ask 'how to seize / the grains of now'. One of Page's (implicit) ...
... (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 whi ...
States of Poetry 2017 - ACT | 'No name or rank supplied' by Geoff Page
No name or rank supplied
We’re looking down the barrel of
a.303 Lee Enfield,
standard issue through until
the early 1960s.
The others in the firing squad
have 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 clea ...
Patriotism
‘... the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
Samuel Johnson
But here and there a whisk of it
does no essential harm:
an accidental win or t ...