BOOK REVIEWS:
1. BLIGHT STREET
2. OUT OF COPLEY STREET
3. OPENING THE WINDOWS TO CATCH THE SEA BREEZE
4. THE PEOPLE'S POET TRANSFORMED
5. WALTZING WITH JACK DANCER
6. POEMS FOR A DEAD FATHER
7. PUNCH ON PUNCH OFF
NEWLY RELEASED VERSE NOVELLA:
BLIGHT STREET
BLIGHT STREET - BACK COVER BLURBS:
THE HONOURABLE CHRIS KOURAKIS
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia
All three of the predominant themes of Geoff Goodfellow’s substantial contribution to Australian literature run through this verse novella: the heroism of working class struggle. The tragedy of addiction and the celebration of love and sexual attraction.
Geoff has always shown a concern for those abandoned youths who are left to navigate their way through the dysfunction wrought by alcohol, drugs and violence. Blight Street continues Geoff’s iconoclastic disregard for stale literary formalism, in order to allow his protagonists to relate their narratives in their own voices.
‘I won’t get into the Ice like me old man’ says Carl, ‘the thought of what it’s done ... leaves me cold’. From his prison cell Carl’s father laments that ‘no-one comes to see me now’ but is still making ‘too many excuses’while Carl is left to ‘pull and hold his crying mother in tight’ on the occasion of her fourth ‘AA birthday’. ‘Pity it wasn’t bloody more’ swears Larissa about the prison sentence imposed on her abusive father.
This book is a must for parents, for teachers, for young adults and for everyone who has an understanding of, and sympathy for, human frailty and the raw emotions of the human condition.
KAREN FLANAGAN AM
Principal Advisor Child Protection, Save the Children Australia
Reading as a vintage child protection social worker of almost forty years – I can verify that Geoff Goodfellow’s poignant and powerful words, bring to life the harsh conditions and raw emotion experienced by far too many facing the relentless daily grind of survival as testified in Blight Street.
By illuminating this ‘invisible’ reality, Goodfellow offers hope through glimmers of acute self-insight peppered with flashes of fierce resilience and heart warming optimism. Blight Street is beautifully and brutally confronting and totally resonates with my working experience in Northern Ireland during ‘the Troubles’ and in Australia.
DR. TERENCE DONALD
Paediatric Forensic Physician
Those readers who have locked onto the poetry of Geoff Goodfellow since the late 1980’s will find this verse novella quite reflective of his confronting, somewhat aggressive and ‘message containing’ story telling style.
However, his fans expect a respectful sensitivity to emerge and it does in these three stories which portray the troubled, precarious existence (but with prospect for resolution) of three families struggling and barely surviving in circumstances of varying levels of adversity.
While there isn’t any clear resolution of the sufferings and circumstances of the protagonists in this novella, Geoff Goodfellow allows a definite but varying degree of optimism to develop in each of the stories. Individual readers will experience this according to their own perceptions and experiences.
The novella will highlight to the more privileged reader, who knows of the existence of but little else about the truth of this compromised group in society, of the need to ensure that they receive the assistance that they want and deserve.
INREVIEW BOOK REVIEW
Ben Adams
July 2022
In his new verse novellla, SA poet Geoff Goodfellow serves up a no-holds-barred slice of life on the margins in outer-suburban contemporary Australia.
For Goodfellow, the writing, reading, teaching and sharing of poetry – its subject matter and social utility – are inextricably bound. Blight Street is a welcome addition to that valuable practice.
AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW (ABR)
Jay Daniel Thompson
December 2020, no. 427
The book’s key strength is its emotional restraint. Goodfellow relays grim and possibly painful memories with nary a skerrick of judgement, self-pity, or melodrama. He demonstrates a devastating knack for bringing to life the minutiae of a bygone era: the social mores and conventions, the sights, the conversations. Consider dialogue such as: ‘Listen Bluey, you’ll want portholes in ya coffin.’ These passages crackle with the sound of retro Australiana.
THE ADELAIDE REVIEW
29 September 2020
Royce Kurmelovs is an Australian freelance journalist and author of The Death of Holden (2016), Rogue Nation (2017) and Boom and Bust (2018).
To talk about Geoff Goodfellow’s work with any insight, it is first necessary to put it into the proper context. Though the stories he tells and the characters he has captured over his long career may well be familiar to many, the eminent poet of everyday life is often misunderstood.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (SMH) AND THE AGE
Fiona Capp
January 15, 2021
It was Ken Kesey who encouraged Geoff Goodfellow to write prose, impressed by his distinctively Australian voice after hearing him read his poetry. Inspired by Kesey’s advice to ‘‘write about little things and invest them with interest’’, Goodfellow spins sometimes gentle, sometimes edgy, yarns from memorable moments in his working-class boyhood. In keeping with a young boy’s perspective, we are given pieces of the puzzle of the adult world – his father’s drinking, nightmares, visits to ‘‘that madhouse ward’’, war service and patience with his son when teaching him to make things with tools. Later we see Goodfellow as a rebellious teenager with a motor bike and finally as a mature man reflecting on the ‘‘savage’’ sport of boxing and the primeval urges that putting on a pair of gloves can unleash.
TASMANIAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
Out of Copley Street: A Working-Class Boyhood
"All the hallmarks of Goodfellow’s poetry have more-than survived the transition to prose. His fondness for playing with language is as present as ever with clever puns, rhyming slang and similes aplenty. There’s also attention to detail, dry wit and humorous insight, understatement, and - yes - his trademark brutal honesty. An economical writer, Goodfellow efficiently orients the reader at the start of each story and ends each anecdote with a punchy closing line."
GLAM ADELAIDE
November 23, 2020
Out of Copley Street would make a welcome addition to any Adelaidean’s book collection and will provide a simple read in that Goodfellow style that will bring a wry smile to the face. Put this one on your Christmas wish list or perhaps, surprise a loved one (particularly a parent or grandparent who lived in Adelaide at that time) with a copy. I am sure they will cherish it. Here’s to his next volume of prose.
READ PLUS: REVIEW
September 30, 2020
Out of Copley Street, A working-class boyhood by Geoff Goodfellow
Review by Elizabeth Bondar
This narrative is vividly persuasive, as it becomes evident to the reader that Goodfellow's talent lies in his ability with words, in his vivid evocation of his experiences throughout his childhood and adolescence, seen so vividly in his storytelling. This compelling narrative would be suitable for all readers from early adolescence through to adults.
Elizabeth Bondar
CLOWE WRITER
Cameron Lowe
28 January 2022
I cannot recommend Out of Copley Street enough. It’s a well written origin story of a poet whose raw, compelling voice made me fall in love with poetry. If you enjoy poetry, author origin stories or autobiographies set in post-WW2 Australia, I recommend you read this book. You’ll be taken on an incredible journey through working class Australia and witness what makes Goodfellow’s poetry so compelling.
AUSTRALIAN POETRY JOURNAL
Geoff Goodfellow and
Carol Jenkins
page: 155-157
→ Geoff Goodfellow. Opening the Windows to Catch the Sea Breeze: Selected Poems 1983-2011. ISBN 9781743052952. Adelaide: Wakefield, 2014. RRP$24.95
→ Carol Jenkins. Xn. ISBN 9781922186201. Sydney: Puncher and Wattmann, 2013. RRP$25
TEXT REVIEW
A poet’s place and time
TEXT
Vol 19 No 1 April 2015
http://www.textjournal.com.au
General Editor: Nigel Krauth. Editors: Enza Gandolfo & Linda Weste
Reviews Editor: Ross Watkins
text@textjournal.com.au
IN DAILY - ADELAIDE INDEPENDENT NEWS
In a recent review I said of another book that at more than 200 pages and sensibly priced, in the age of the over-priced slim volume of poetry, it was a bumper offering of quantity as well as quality. The same applies here. And if these poems were not to be value enough, then an introductory autobiography could be. In unwavering style, the narrative has eloquence in its bluntness, pathos in its irony.
TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURE VOL. 4 NO. 1
Debra Zott
November 2011
Goodfellow is well known for his working class, straight-talking poetry, famously delivered on building sites and in prison. Two of his great strengths are the no bullshit honesty of his poems and his ability to home in on seemingly ordinary, yet surprisingly poignant details. So it is not surprising that when faced with the challenge of battling that c word, he would slowly peel away the euphemisms like a soiled bandage and expose the raw wound of cancer for what it is.
EDITOR AND MANUSCRIPT CRITIQUER
Sherryl Clark
1st June 2011
If you've ever heard Geoff Goodfellow read his poetry, or indeed if you've read any of his books, you know his style - straight, uncompromising, accessible, real. Waltzing With Jack Dancer takes Geoff's work a step further forward, I think. I sat down with it the other day, intending to read a few poems and come back to it later, and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting.
OVERLAND
Mark William Jackson
11th May 2011
Cancer is indiscriminate, picking its battles with seeming randomness. There are hypothesised causes: smoking, drinking, sun etc, but they are not definitive. Cancer picked the wrong fight when it tried to take on Geoff Goodfellow, the man HG Nelson describes as ‘tough nut’. Geoff’s boxing training, working-class background and teenage daughter were three things that cancer didn’t count on.
Waltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer is a collection of narrative poems telling Geoff’s battle with and ultimate victory over cancer of the throat.
POEMS FOR A DEAD FATHER - REVIEWED:
CORDITE POETRY REVIEW
Paul Mitchell
For all its appearance of plain speech, Poems for a Dead Father is a finely crafted work that takes the reader on an emotional journey that's never mawkish or sentimental. The tenderness and honesty in this work means that, before you know it, you've let your guard down and copped a punch from Goodfellow-and his Dad.
THE AGE
The sources of poetic power
In Geoff Goodfellow's Poems for a Dead Father there is grief, but also the ambivalence sons feel for fathers. Goodfellow's role as ``working-class poet'' is seen in his taking poetry to building workers. The power of ``working-class writing'' is supposed to come from being direct, not over-burdened with the ``literary''. Goodfellow seems direct enough: autobiographical, demotic in tone. But midway through the book there is a change of tone and approach.
Here’s an excerpted selection of what other critics have had to say:
The poems yarn and take you into a mix of funny, naked, larrikin feeling.
- Barry Hill
The Weekend Australian
Geoff Goodfellow is a master of understatement…
-Kerry Leves
Overland
This book represents Goodfellow at his best. Too often, working-class poetry has been used as an excuse for poets who are unable or unwilling to meet the technical demands of the form…Goodfellow shows that the genre can have its own power and integrity.
- Geoff Page
Australian Book Review
What Goodfellow has given us is a robust insight into the vital dynamic of life: Love. Is there a better gift?
- Christopher Bantick
The Sunday Tasmanian
…this work resonates with honesty and immediacy.
- Kay Brindal
Opinion
…he writes poetry that challenges, evokes, entertains, and yet can move the more sensitive to tears.
- Graham Cornes
The Advertiser
This poetry is unmistakenly Australian, working-class and masculine, emerging from deep within a world of Vietnam veterans, drink, death, family, frayed lino, laminex and sex, and the politics of class.
- Lyn McCredden
The Age
I have always liked Geoff’s poems, especially his aggressive working-class celebrations with their hearty irreverence and their understanding of how language can pull you in, holus bolus.
- Dr Thomas Shapcott
Good Weekend Magazine
Geoff Goodfellow’s Poems for a Dead Father is a class act. It is simply the best work of a poet at the peak of his poetical power.
- Glen Murdoch
Sidewalk Magazine
Goodfellow’s self- narrative that winds through his text, his humour and eye for detail, make this rough elegiac cycle powerful.
- David McCooey
The Age
He (Goodfellow) has long been an evangelist for the power of poetry to connect with each and every life in a world saturated with sophisticated noise.
- Rosemary Sorensen
The Courier Mail
I loved reading it a second time, and will return to it again, and again. I believe that it will appeal to senior students, both girls and boys, because its tough as well as sensitive…
- Guy Bayly-Jones
Opinion
