Geoff Page

Last updated

Geoff Page
BornGeoffrey Donald Page
(1940-09-07) 7 September 1940 (age 84)
Grafton, New South Wales, Australia
OccupationPoet
Notable awards2001 Patrick White Award; 2006 Christopher Brennan Award

Geoffrey Donald Page OAM (born 7 July 1940) is an Australian poet, translator, teacher and jazz enthusiast.

Contents

He has published 22 collections of poetry, as well as prose and verse novels. Poetry and jazz are his driving interests, and he has also written a biography of the jazz musician Bernie McGann. He organises poetry readings and jazz events in Canberra.

Life

Geoff Page was born in Grafton, New South Wales, and studied at the University of New England. [1] Sir Earle Page, who was briefly Prime Minister of Australia, was his grandfather.

Career

Page has held residencies at numerous academic, military and political institutions, including Edith Cowan University, Curtin University, the Australian Defence Force Academy, and the University of Wollongong. From 1974 to 2001 Page was head of the English department at Narrabundah College, a secondary college in Canberra. He retired from teaching in 2001.

He has travelled widely, talking on Australian poetry in Switzerland, Britain, Italy, Singapore, China, the United States and New Zealand. His poetic style ranges from lyrical to satirical, from serious to humorous – and often addresses his concerns about contemporary society and politics. Judith Beveridge writes that "Page is a humanely satirical poet. He lets us view our condition with a fusion of the comic and the tragic." [2]

Page is the poetry reviewer for ABC Radio's The Book Show and, for a decade before that, its Books and Writing program. [3]

Page curates the Poetry at the Gods and Jazz at the Gods series at the Gods Cafe in Canberra. [4]

He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2023 Australia Day Honours. [5]

Style

Australian poet John Tranter in his 1983 review of The Younger Australian Poets (edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann) wrote of Page:

He is not a self-promoter, and his modest output has been inadequately represented in recent anthologies, as the editors of this one quite properly point out. His poetry has been influenced loosely by the American William Carlos Williams. In general, the spare precision of Williams' short lines is a good preventive against galloping garrulity, and in Page's hands it delivers a dry and particularly Australian accent and a thoughtful movement from phrase to phrase. The short line, as a model, can be overdone: 'of 3 a.m.' is an example that does little for me. Page's technique is low-key – his French and American influences are invisible in the texture of his localised speech – yet it enables him to range widely among language and experience. [6]

Awards and nominations

Bibliography

I look up Wikipedia
and find instead the world,
the way it tends to ramify,
its openness to doubt,
the "more work needed" here and there,
"citations to be added",
an absence of the absolute,
the comfort of the useful
while everything is slipping sideways
and yet it mainly works.
Even those two testaments
were written by successive hands
imagining dictation.
The world, it's plain, is inexact –
and so with Wikipedia.
In love with the provisional
it's planning to embrace the earth
and tweak it into sense.

Geoff Page in The Weekend Australian,
31 May/1 June 2014, Review, p. 20

Poetry

Collections
List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Jimmy James1996Page, Geoff (January–February 1996). "Jimmy James". Quadrant. 40 (1–2 [323]): 71.
The horizontals1996Page, Geoff (March 1996). "The horizontals". Quadrant. 40 (3): 32.
The second law1996Page, Geoff (March 1996). "The second law". Quadrant. 40 (3): 32.
Secular rites1996Page, Geoff (1996). The secret. Kew, Vic.: William Heinemann Australia. "Secular rites". Australian Poetry Library.
The shovel1996Page, Geoff (July–August 1996). "The shovel". Quadrant. 40 (7–8): 20.

Criticism and anthologies

Book reviews

DateReview articleWork(s) reviewed
2013Page, Geoff (April 2013). "[Untitled review]". Australian Book Review . 350: 40.Emery, Brook (2012). Collusion. St Kilda, Vic.: John Leonard Press.
2013Page, Geoff (April 2013). "Lords of nothing". Australian Book Review . 350: 65.Rieth, Homer (2013). 150 motets. North Fitzroy, Vic.: Black Pepper.
2014Page, Geoff (September 2014). "[Untitled review]". Australian Book Review . 364: 42.Turner, Todd (2014). Woodsmoke. North Fitzroy, Vic.: Black Pepper.

Memoirs and nonfiction

Works in progress

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tranter</span> Australian writer (1943–2023)

John Ernest Tranter was an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He published more than twenty books of poetry; devising, with Jan Garrett, the long running ABC radio program Books and Writing; and founding in 1997 the internet quarterly literary magazine Jacket which he published and edited until 2010, when he gave it to the University of Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Les Murray (poet)</span> Australian poet and critic (1938-2019)

Leslie Allan Murray was an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings.

Laurence James Duggan, known as Laurie Duggan, is an Australian poet, editor, and translator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosemary Dobson</span> Australian poet, illustrator, editor and anthologist

Rosemary de Brissac Dobson, AO was an Australian poet, who was also an illustrator, editor and anthologist. She published fourteen volumes of poetry, was published in almost every annual volume of Australian Poetry and has been translated into French and other languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordie Albiston</span> Australian poet and academic (1961–2022)

Jordie Albiston was an Australian poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Lehmann</span> Australian poet

Geoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet, children's writer, and tax lawyer.

The Grace Leven Prize for Poetry was an annual poetry award in Australia, given in the name of Grace Leven who died in 1922. It was established by William Baylebridge who "made a provision for an annual poetry prize in memory of 'my benefactress Grace Leven' and for the publication of his own work". Grace was his mother's half-sister.

Stephen Edgar is an Australian poet, editor and indexer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Neilsen</span> Australian poet

Philip Max Neilsen is an Australian poet, fiction writer and editor. He teaches poetry at the University of Queensland and was previously professor of creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Holland-Batt</span> Australian poet and academic

Sarah Holland-Batt is a contemporary Australian poet, critic, and academic.

Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, literary critic, editor and academic.

Petra White is an Australian poet. White was born in Adelaide in 1975, the eldest of six children, and now lives in Berlin with her husband and daughter. Her first published collection of poetry, The Incoming Tide, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and the ACT Poetry Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Foulcher</span> Australian poet and teacher

John Foulcher is an Australian poet and teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Pretty</span> Australian poet (1940–2023)

Ronald Keith Pretty was an Australian poet, editor, publisher and teacher.

Stephen Kenneth Kelen, known as S. K. Kelen, is an Australian poet and educator. S. K. Kelen began publishing poetry in 1973, when he won a Poetry Australia contest for young poets and several of his poems were published in that journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Hetherington</span> Australian poet and academic

Paul Hetherington is an Australian poet and Emeritus Professor at The University of Canberra, Australia. He is the winner of the ACT Literary Awards: inaugural Marion Halligan Award (2024) for his book of poetry, Sleeplessness. Prior to becoming an academic, he worked as Director of Publications and Events at the National Library of Australia in the Australian Public Service.

Stuart Barnes is an Australian poet.

Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of four award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, Empirical, and Mirabilia. Her second novel, The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction (shared). Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.

"Suburban Sonnet" is a poem by Australian poet Gwen Harwood.

"Because" is a poem by Australian poet James McAuley.

References

  1. ↑ Poetry Foundation: Geoff Page
  2. ↑ Back page blurb, Agnostic Skies, Melbourne, Five Islands Press, 2006
  3. ↑ Geoff Page's Seriatum
  4. ↑ The Gods Cafe Special Events Archived 21 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine Accessed 30 December 2011
  5. ↑ "Mr Geoffrey Donald PAGE". It's an Honour. Retrieved 25 January 2023.
  6. ↑ "John Tranter: Reviewer". Archived from the original on 13 May 2008. Retrieved 16 February 2008.
  7. ↑ "Page wins 2017 ACU Poetry Prize". Books+Publishing. 1 September 2017. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
  8. ↑ "Page wins 2020 ACU Prize for Poetry". Books+Publishing. 22 September 2020. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.