Leading up to 1953, there is Picaro Press’ collection, Cloudy Nouns. It’s introduced on the back cover by Michael McGirr who notes this book as a worthy successor to its nineteen predecessors – Page’s poetry being ‘one of the lesser known pleasures of Australian writing’. Cloudy nouns gather in the skies of these poems, where words like fields, copse, meadow never quite made it to this country in the British sailing ships that reached these shores. These were the ships whose nouns had to leave behind ‘the certainty of rain’. Page asserts the rights of this new country to its own rough-hewn home-made nouns. There are still surprises – it’s not all nationalism and resentment directed at the privileged – when what might from a distance be ring-barked trees turn out to be limbs that ‘farm the wind’. Old men and women, the last of their kind, the last of their bush trade, mothers, disappear into these poems as if they are pocked with abandoned mine shafts or constitute their own event horizons.
Sometimes Page’s spare style opens moments of delicacy where he reigns back the beat of his lines to something less metric, more hesitant, for the sake of an image:
Sometimes when I wake too soon ... it is enough to read your breathing to scan your soft half-metric sighs to second-guess perhaps the movie showing in your silent eyes.
Always though, there is this awareness of the craft of what he is doing. There is the curious long poem of bemusement describing a comfortable love, a love that happily seems as entrapped by rituals and rhythms as a villanelle, a ballad or a sonnet. There is the amusement offered to the reader when this poet appreciates his lover as he might an expert editor. There is the amused and historical perspective of a poet ‘way too grey already’. From nouns, when the deaths of poets enter the poems, adjectives are given the kind of attention that experience can afford. None of them, especially the superlatives, stand up to scrutiny: superlatives no longer sing – /though synonyms for ‘Mediocre’/are, of course, another thing (from ‘Four for Peter Porter’). Mortality does not haunt this book, but informs and invigorates it. What things, towards the end, do we discover, we really do need?
I see it’s just a few: CDs, books and coffee, yes — and wine (a glass or two).
This is both flatly real and ironically clever, for it reveals this poet is not so much at the end of life as in one of its ‘late’ phases. Page has great fun in this poem, ‘Saturday Morning’, detailing the ways we might, in our seventies, just maintain an interest in life around us. Similarly, the resistance to the recycling of the ineffable in the re-reading of Rumi in a wonderfully dyspeptic poem, ‘Rumi’, is high entertainment (that nevertheless tries to play a double game). This is the poetry of a master, but perhaps one for whom the wide river of rhythmic effects that carry whole trees and homes and whatnot with it is too much of a roar in his mind. Every topic, any topic, can be thrown into the current and carried, bobbing and tossing on these amazingly forceful lines. Maybe what I’m saying is … take this poetry in doses smaller than a bookful at a time. It’s a heady place to be, on the banks of this poetry. Sometimes the poems are perfect little clockwork things (and I know from experience the joy of creating and tinkering with these linguisitc toys in order to get them just right), and ‘La Rêve’ to Marion Halligan is one of these. You would have to be churlish not to enjoy it.
There are poems of bitter social comment too, though none as effective as the one that brings the nouns and verbs and rhythmic prose of ‘Regulations’ devised to undress, inspect and subdue the bodies of asylum seekers. Thank you, Geoff Page, for another book of strong poems to be taken sparingly.
The third book here, A Sudden Sentence in the Air, is the beautiful jazz production published by Miriam Zolin of extempore, out of sheer love for music and poetry. Page has done the book proud with his poetry, and the cover is a work of frozen music. I have to confess that I have written an introduction to the book, so cannot now pretend to be its reviewer. I can only in fairness give you my introduction and recommend that you segue from intro to solo:
Every city has its poetry holes and jazz joints, there for those who seek them out.
Not every city has its Geoff Page; poet-musician, entrepreneurial manager of one of Australia’s best small jazz events, historian of jazz and critic of poetry, individualist and maybe the voice of a generation touched by jazz. He has been listening to jazz for more than fifty years now, and you’ll find sequestered in these pages all his yesterdays brought back and into the life that words can give to life. Look for his poem ‘Sequestered’ in here – flowing smooth as a Paul Desmond saxophone performance, and it’s its own riveting poem even while it celebrates nostalgia. The poem brings that Page-ian persistence to the holding of a note through 27 lines improvised out of air but solid as any art needs to be.
These poems sing in response to the jazz musicians that Page discovered early in his life. It is as if he glimpsed the purest possibilities of a certain world just next to this one, but not quite noticed, never quite relished, left too often to itself, and for this poet, an irresistible subject matter. He is the quintessential convert, convinced that most of us still ‘are not sufficiently astonished’. You will find here, poems on Oscar Peterson, that big man in a big suit, the bones of his concert piano exposed, ‘with sweaty black fingers and splendid rings’, Hampton Hawes whose audiences chatted through his meditative moments, the lanky Bill Evans dressed like an accountant, whose music was as ‘logical as air’, Bud Powell ‘stabbing’, ‘skating’, as one hand ‘scuttles’ while the other disappears, the big-jawed handsome, genial giant of a man, Dexter Gordon, walking loosely in places ‘where only dancing mattered’, and the coolest of cool Paul Desmond, that lithe man in a cream suit playing ‘Emily’(check him out on YouTube) at the 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival. ‘It’s not a miracle exactly’ Page writes, ‘but something very close’, and you believe him.
What is a poet, a historian, a convert worth if he’s not sometimes grumpy with the rest of the world, especially with audiences that talk (or shriek at bars) through a performance that deserves to be heard in the silence that opens ears and minds? You’ll hear the hard chords of the gripes in here too, along with the love, and the amazing beauty of the poetry.
Life, someone told this poet, is a set of chords. ‘And God, of course, a jazz musician’. Life is a set of re-arrangements too, and opportunities for ‘a solo greater than the clichés/from which it was assembled’. This poetry might gesture towards and even embrace many of the clichés of jazz, but never without love, without inventiveness, without real music showing through.
These poems are an education in the recent history of jazz, they’re a possible shopping list for the newcomer, and they are companion-pieces to the music many love and cherish. Thank you for these poems, Geoff Page.
