- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Geoff Page
Review Short: Jill Jones’s Brink
It’s a neat twenty-five years since Jill Jones’s first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star, was published and in that time she has built for herself a reputation as a serious and ambitious poet whose work demands, and generally rewards, close reading. She is certainly not a poet of easy gestures or flashy effects.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Geoff Page, Jill Jones
John Woodcock Graves the younger [with] Truganini
So often reproduced and yet the message so elusive. John Woodcock Graves the younger, lawyer, writer, poet, ‘friend’, is standing high beside her, not quite profile, looking down, frock coat reaching to his knees. Truganini, Trugernanner, also known as Lalla …
Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC
Tagged Geoff Page
Review Short: Amanda Anastasi and Robbie Coburn’s The Silences
These 41 pages from a revived Eaglemont Press (once run by the late, revered Melbourne poet, Shelton Lea) contain the first collections (or first half-collections) of Lea’s much younger fellow-Melbournians, Amanda Anastasi and Robbie Coburn. It’s analogous to two good friends buying a very small inner-city flat to get a toe-hold in the daunting real estate market of that city. Bigger things are sure to come later.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Amanda Anastasi, Geoff Page, Robbie Coburn
Review Short: Mike Ladd’s Invisible Mending
Adelaide poet, Mike Ladd, is best known for his long-running Poetica program on the ABC’s Radio National (eighteen years all up before its casual destruction in 2014). The breadth of taste and openness to a wide range of influences Ladd displayed in Poetica is also to be found in Invisible Mending, his first poetry collection since Transit in 2007.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Geoff Page, Mike Ladd
Review Short: Dennis Haskell’s What Are You Doing Here? Selected Poems
Dennis Haskell’s new selected is part of an interesting trend. In the past few months three other Australian poets (Adrian Caesar, Jan Owen and Robyn Rowland) have also had books published overseas that, in more congenial times, might well have been published here. In each case there’s a plausible explanation but it’s an interesting phenomenon even so.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Dennis Haskell, Geoff Page
Sometimes in your later
Sometimes in your later years it is enough to read the titles only. shorthand for the contents you cannot quite recall. The sleety ironies of Philip Larkin, say, a flatness everybody knows but he defined, bending to his bike-clips. Wallace …
Posted in 68: NO THEME IV
Tagged Geoff Page
Geoff Page Reviews John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s latest foray into what has become known as ‘ecopoetics’ raises many more aesthetic and political questions than can be resolved in a short review. As in his Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008), Kinsella makes vivid and considerable use of autobiography. He and his family are presented as embattled eco-pioneers in a region already much destroyed by bad farming practices, partly multi-national in origin, and roamed over at will by township hoons ready to shoot up anything that moves.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Geoff Page, John Kinsella
Art Tatum
1909 — 1956 The legends and the anecdotes are only half of it; Charlie Parker early on, night-club kitchen, washing plates just to hear the sound then saying as saxophonist ‘I wish I could play like Tatum’s right hand’; the …
Posted in 61: NO THEME III
Tagged Geoff Page
A Silence
We watch them sitting down beside us, (she, the latte; he, long black) and see them splitting up the paper (he, the sport, and she, the crossword). Five or forty years ago, we would have seen them leaning inwards antiphonal …
Posted in 60: SILENCE
Tagged Geoff Page
Geoff Page Reviews Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Now a youthful 79, the Melbourne poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, has been an important figure in Australian poetry since the early 1960s. As a teacher, scholar, anthologist and organizer – as well as a poet with at least fourteen volumes to his name – Wallace-Crabbe has been central to much that has happened in Australian poetry over the past fifty years, especially in Melbourne. As with his friend, the late Peter Porter, Wallace-Crabbe’s lightly-worn erudition and distinctive sense of humour have ensured that his work is admired by many poets (and readers) across the aesthetic divisions in our poetry reaching back to the 1970s.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Geoff Page
The Interlocutors: Poetry and Jazz in Collaboration
How do jazz and poetry talk to each other? Of course, they can lament their shared marginality to the majority culture – but that will take us only so far. They can boast of their heroic figures over a century (jazz) or the millennia (poetry). They can hyperventilate about the talents of the latest prodigies in either form, but that will almost always be ahead of the facts.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Allan Browne, Geoff Page, jazz poetry, John Clare, Lynn Hard
The Anthologist
Of course, it is a work of love — and has the smell of dust about it, the love that settles from the air on everything unread. It has the whiff of toner, too, the creak of books split newly …
Posted in 43: OZ-KO (ENVOY)
Tagged Geoff Page
Pasternak and David Lean Maurice Jarre and Stalin
The bits don’t fit. . . Mr Whippy in the suburbs between the psalms of mowers and clean cars of a Sunday. The tune is mixing up its message: 6/8 on a high celeste the kind that wings might stroke …
Posted in 06: NEW POETRY
Tagged Geoff Page
The History of Mr Howard
Give me back the smell of pencils Monday morning in their boxes the mucilage and ink in inkwells the Mercator’s above the blackboard with half the world in red give me back that ‘firm but just’ preceptor of my childhood …
Posted in 06: NEW POETRY
Tagged Geoff Page