Product Description
Geoff Page’s New Selected Poems offers a tight but generous sample from more than forty years’ work by this major Australian poet. It does full justice to the poet’s extraordinary range of subject matter and poetic modes — from his pastoral origins to the city life he prefers, from Australian history and politics through to religion, from the quietly lyrical to the brutally satirical — while being never less than deeply enjoyable.
Geoff Page has become one of the very finest celebrators of our culture, in its broadest sense; of particulars of our history, and uniqueness. His work is full of great affection and is written without pretension or program.
— Robert Gray, The Sydney Morning Herald
Page at this stage of his career is certainly one of our major poets, a poet who has made memorable poetry out of clarity, openness and a commitment to the formal possibilities of language.
— Judith Beveridge.
REVIEWS
“In the vividness and variety of its poetic gallery, in its formal assurance and moral heft, Geoff Page’s New Selected Poems is a fitting (though one hopes provisional) summary of a career that is now moving steadily towards its half century. The work collected here is, as he says, ”drawn from more than 40 years of writing”. Excluded are excerpts from his five verse novels (a form flourishing as never before in Australian poetry), as well as his ”tandem translations and … eight-liner travel chapbooks”. What is left is a rich traverse of his roots, in a pastoralist family based by the Clarence River in northern NSW, from which he turned away for the city; numerous plangent investigations of the personal costs of war; poems of travel; light verse, for which Page has as deft a touch as any of his contemporaries.” PETER PIERCE, The Canberra Times
“Geoff Page speaks in a manner consistent with the voices he was brought up with—practical, shrewd voices that may surmise a little, but which prefer not to speculate too far. He was, after all, the recipient of his mother’s ‘protestant proverbs’,4 the scion of a family of graziers of many generations. Not that Page sounds exactly like either a grazier or, for that matter, the teacher he became but rather how they might sound if they spoke with a poet’s care—minimalist, attentive, quietly rhythmic, with an awareness of the underlying emotional reality poised against the need to make the next decision.” MARTIN LANGFORD, Meanjin
“Page is a great observer, a flâneur of both the city and the country, so it is no surprise that New Selected Poems includes many diverse portraits…The portraits present a sharp selection of details and are intelligent, mature, and judicious, even wise. Nearly all are brief and anonymous, perhaps reflecting the belief in the unknowability of others.” DENNIS HASKELL, Australian Book Review (paywalled)
