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Geoff Page. 60 Classic Australian Poems. Sydney: UNSWP, 2009, 288pp. ISBN: 9781921410796 AU$34.95 (pbk)
https://www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9781921410796.htm
Geoff Page's selection of 'classic Australian' poems is a brave effort to display the development and achievement of a body or work that will bear comparison with any in the 'Anglosphere'. Page also claims to focus on poems that strike him as 'unequivocally enjoyable, even if that enjoyment is sometimes hard-won' (12). I doubt that readers will entirely agree. The book occupies a space somewhere along the spectrum of middle-school poetry text and teach-yourself poetry appreciation manual. The same might be said of his 2006 anthology, 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now. The structure of each is strikingly similar to Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), a concatenation of poems with commentaries culled from her UK weekly Independent on Sunday column. Page and Padel are enthusiastic teachers, but the whiff of the classroom is palpable in their methodological rigour and tone.
The didactic impulse is rife elsewhere: in Neil Astley's popular themed anthologies Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (2002) and its sequel Being Alive (2004), in Edward Hirsch's more discursive though to many minds overly pedantic How to Read a Poem (2000), and a plethora of other books aimed at assuring readers that they learn how to enjoy poetry. Astley's collections constitute armchair, bedside or travelling companions; poems range across loss, physical or spiritual journeys, and so on, with tactfully brief introductory remarks on the matter of each grouping. Other collections and how-to volumes extend the pleasure further, by assuming that readers already enjoy poetry. Some omit or abridge the crash course on metrics, figures and forms, to highlight images and the versatility of language: notable examples are Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux's 1997 The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, and Kenneth Koch's anthology appended to his 1998 essays Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. Addonizio, Laux and Koch celebrate the life of the poet and the joy of writing; their comments, short and illuminating, exuberantly convey their sense that every poem is an event rather than a subject for vivisection.
Page's distinction is to be first in the field focusing so closely...