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Geoff Page

{{Short description|Australian poet}}

{{Use Australian English|date=January 2017}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=December 2020}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Geoff Page

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| birth_name = Geoffrey Donald Page

| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1940|09|7|df=y}}

| birth_place = Grafton, New South Wales, Australia

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| occupation = Poet

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| awards = 2001 Patrick White Award; 2006 Christopher Brennan Award

}}

Geoffrey Donald Page {{Post-nominals|country=AUS|OAM}} (born 7 July 1940) is an Australian poet, novelist, translator, teacher and jazz enthusiast.

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.[http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/geoff-page Poetry Foundation: Geoff Page] 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."Back page blurb, Agnostic Skies, Melbourne, Five Islands Press, 2006

Page is the poetry reviewer for ABC Radio's The Book Show and, for a decade before that, its Books and Writing program.[http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/2074572.htm Geoff Page's Seriatum]

Page curates the Poetry at the Gods and Jazz at the Gods series at the Gods Cafe in Canberra.[http://www.thegodscafe.com/page5.htm The Gods Cafe Special Events] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110921052401/http://www.thegodscafe.com/page5.htm |date=21 September 2011 }} Accessed 30 December 2011

He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2023 Australia Day Honours.{{Cite web |title=Mr Geoffrey Donald PAGE |url=https://honours.pmc.gov.au/honours/awards/2012053 |access-date=2023-01-25 |website=It's an Honour}}

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.{{Cite web |url=http://johntranter.com/reviewer/1983-gray-lehm.shtml |title=John Tranter: Reviewer |access-date=16 February 2008 |archive-date=13 May 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080513155440/http://johntranter.com/reviewer/1983-gray-lehm.shtml |url-status=dead }}

Awards and nominations

  • Queensland Premier's Literary Awards for Poetry
  • 2001: Patrick White Award
  • 2001: Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, for Darker and Lighter
  • 2004: ACT Writing and Publishing Awards for poetry for The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets (editor)
  • 2006: Christopher Brennan Award
  • 2017: ACU Poetry Prize for the poem "Charles S. Ryan to Alice E. Sumner"{{Cite web|date=2017-09-01|title=Page wins 2017 ACU Poetry Prize|url=https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2017/09/01/95183/page-wins-2017-acu-poetry-prize/|access-date=2020-09-26|website=Books+Publishing|language=en-AU}}
  • 2020: ACU Poetry Prize for the poem "Jericho"{{Cite web|date=2020-09-22|title=Page wins 2020 ACU Prize for Poetry|url=https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2020/09/22/156923/page-wins-2020-acu-prize-for-poetry/|access-date=2020-09-26|website=Books+Publishing|language=en-AU}}

Bibliography

{{Quote box|fontsize=130%|style=font-family:Garamond, Georgia, serif;|bgcolor=#F5F6CE|source=Geoff Page in The Weekend Australian,
31 May/1 June 2014, Review, p. 20|quote=

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.}}

=Poetry=

;Collections

  • {{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |editor1=Page, Geoff |editor2=Roberts, Philip |title=Two poets |location=St Lucia, Qld. |publisher=University of Queensland Press |year=1971 |chapter=The question}}
  • {{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |author-mask=1 |title=Smalltown memorials |location=St Lucia, Qld. |publisher=University of Queensland Press |year=1975}}
  • {{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |author-mask=1 |title=Collecting the weather |location=Brisbane |publisher=Makar Press |year=1978 |series=[Gargoyle Poets; 32] }}
  • {{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |author-mask=1 |title=Cassandra Paddocks |year=1980 }}
  • {{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |author-mask=1 |title=Clairvoyant in autumn |year=1983 }}
  • Collected Lives (1986)
  • Smiling in English, Smoking in French (1987)
  • Footwork (1988)
  • Selected Poems (1991)
  • Gravel Corners (1992)
  • Human Interest (1994)
  • Mrs Schnell arrives in heaven, and other light verse (1995)
  • {{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |title=The secret |location=Kew, Vic. |publisher=William Heinemann Australia |year=1996}}
  • The Great Forgetting (Geoff Page and Bevan Hayward Pooaraar) (1997)
  • Bernie McGann: A Life in Jazz (1997)
  • The Scarring (1999, verse novel)
  • Collateral Damage (1999)
  • Darker and Lighter (2001)
  • My Mother's God (2002)
  • Drumming on Water (2003, verse novel)
  • Cartes Postales (2004)
  • Freehold (2005, verse novel)
  • Agnostic Skies (2006)
  • Europe 101 (2006)
  • Bahn dance (2007)
  • Seriatim (2007)
  • Coda for Shirley (2011)
  • A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (2011)
  • Cloudy Nouns (2012)
  • Shifting Windows (2012)
  • 1953 (2013)
  • New Selected Poems (2013)
  • Improving the News (2013)
  • Gods and Uncles (2015)
  • Cara Carissima, a verse drama (2015)
  • Plevna: A Biography in Verse: Sir Charles 'Plevna' Ryan (1853–1926) UWA Publishing (2016)
  • Hard Horizons (2017)
  • Elegy for Emily: A verse biography of Emily Remler (1957–1990) (2018)
  • In Media Res (2019)
  • 101 Poems (2011-2021) (2022)
  • Penultima (2023)

;Selected list of poems

class='wikitable sortable' width='90%'
width=25%|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected

Jimmy James

|1996

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=Jan–Feb 1996 |title=Jimmy James |journal=Quadrant |volume=40 |issue=1–2 [323] |pages=71}}

|

data-sort-value="Horizontals"|The horizontals

|1996

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=Mar 1996 |title=The horizontals |journal=Quadrant |volume=40 |issue=3 |page=32}}

|

The second law

|1996

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=Mar 1996 |title=The second law |journal=Quadrant |volume=40 |issue=3 |page=32 |url= }}

|

Secular rites

|1996

|{{cite book |author=Page, Geoff |title=The secret |location=Kew, Vic. |publisher=William Heinemann Australia |year=1996}}

|{{cite web |title=Secular rites|url=http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/page-geoff/secular-rites-0233006|publisher=Australian Poetry Library }}

The shovel

|1996

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=Jul–Aug 1996 |title=The shovel |journal=Quadrant |volume=40 |issue=7–8 |page=20 |url= }}

|

=Criticism and anthologies=

=Book reviews=

class='wikitable sortable' width='90%'
|Date

!class='unsortable'|Review article

!class='unsortable'|Work(s) reviewed

2013

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=April 2013 |title=[Untitled review] |journal=Australian Book Review |volume=350 |pages=40 }}

|{{cite book |author=Emery, Brook |title=Collusion |location=St Kilda, Vic. |publisher=John Leonard Press |year=2012}}

2013

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=April 2013 |title=Lords of nothing |journal=Australian Book Review |volume=350 |pages=65 }}

|{{cite book |author=Rieth, Homer |title=150 motets |location=North Fitzroy, Vic. |publisher=Black Pepper |year=2013}}

2014

|{{cite journal |author=Page, Geoff |date=Sep 2014 |title=[Untitled review] |journal=Australian Book Review |volume=364 |pages=42 |url= }}

|{{cite book |author=Turner, Todd |title=Woodsmoke |location=North Fitzroy, Vic. |publisher=Black Pepper |year=2014}}

=Memoirs and nonfiction=

  • Invisible Histories (1989)
  • Bernie McGann: A life in jazz (1997)
  • Canberra Then and Now (2013)
  • Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (2014)

Benton's Conviction (A Novel) (1985) Angus & Robertson.{{Cite book |last=Page |first=Geoff |title=Benton's Conviction |date=1985 |publisher=Angus & Robertson |isbn=020715113X |location=North Ryde, NSW |pages=175}}

=Works in progress=

  • Shadows from Wire (Poems and photographs in the Great War, as editor)
  • Century of Clouds (Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, translations with Wendy Coutts)

References

{{Reflist}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Page, Geoff}}

Category:1940 births

Category:Australian biographers

Category:Australian male biographers

Category:Australian poets

Category:Recipients of the Medal of the Order of Australia

Category:Writers from the Australian Capital Territory

Category:Living people

Category:People from Grafton, New South Wales

Category:Patrick White Award winners

Category:Australian male poets

Category:Australian Book Review people

Category:Quadrant (magazine) people