Geoff Page

He organises poetry readings and jazz events in Canberra.

• Name — Geoff Page • Birth Name — Geoffrey Donald Page • Born — 7 September 1940 • Birthplace — Grafton, New South Wales, Australia • Occupation — Poet • Awards — 2001 Patrick White Award; 2006 Christopher Brennan Award

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

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." Page is the poetry reviewer for ABC Radio's The Book Show and, for a decade before that, its Books and Writing program. Page curates the Poetry at the Gods and Jazz at the Gods series at the Gods Cafe in Canberra. He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2023 Australia Day Honours.

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.

• Collections * * * * * • 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) * • 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 • Title — |Year — |First published — |Reprinted/collected • Jimmy James — 1996 • data-sort-value="Horizontals"|The horizontals — 1996 • The second law — 1996 • Secular rites — 1996 • The shovel — 1996

• |Date — Review article — Work(s) reviewed • 2013 • 2013 • 2014

• 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.

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