This week’s spotlight shines on a new poetry collection by Geoff Goodfellow, Preparing for Business.
Award-winning poet Geoff Goodfellow is back with another vivid, affecting, laconically dark-witted collection that pulls no punches as it masterfully chronicles Australian life.
As always, Geoff delivers a series of brilliantly captured portraits of working-class life, from the street scenes of formerly industrial Port Adelaide and his home suburb of Semaphore, with its heightened blend of affluence and poverty, to his fearless inhabitations of teenagers beset by home lives that feature domestic violence and addiction.
Post written by Poppy Nwosu
Geoff Goodfellow’s latest poetry collection, Preparing for Business, is coming out very soon, so I thought it would be a good time to offer a sneak peak for this week’s spotlight!
Here is some early praise:
‘Geoff Goodfellow’s poems force you to confront the most basic questions about writing. What stories are worth telling? Which ones are truly meaningful? Where are the real foundations of our culture? Geoff will take you to where life itself is crucial. In the stuff that invisible people do, who battle to survive and who laugh and cry while they get on with it.’
– Mark Seymour, Hunters and Collectors
It is always interesting for me to read Geoff’s poems, as he lives in the same Adelaide neighbourhoods as I do, places that have always struck me as being such a strange mishmash of mansions and factories, empty warehouses and glittering seaside cafes, all nestled together around the beach and river.
In truth, that strange mishmash is something I really love about my home, and I think Geoff certainly captures it very well. True to form, he never shies away from the grit that nestles in beside all the shiny buildings and happy families that populate Semaphore and Port Adelaide, offering an authentic look at the world via his poetry.
Geoff is coming off the success of his most recent release, and also his first prose book, Out of Copley Street, and the poem I’ve picked to highlight this week really ties into that boyhood memoir. In his new collection, Geoff talks about growing up in Adelaide, and his memories of the world as it was.
‘Copley Street’
It was summer of 1960 & i was
twelve years of age
World War 2 had finished
fifteen years earlier
yet there was still fighting
going on in my street
i’d just been through a winter
cutting firewood armed with
a crosscut saw
& i’d learnt how to swing
an axe
& my biceps & shoulders
proved it
one afternoon a boy who lived
nine houses away
wrapped a whip he’d made
from five strand electrical cord
around my arm
after i unwound it i ran home
& went through the backdoor crying
my old man was half drunk & didn’t
want to hear how this boy was
older and taller
get out there & give him a hiding-
you don’t run away
you don’t squib it
two nights later i found the boy in
the street
i belted him to the ground
& punched him senseless
only letting go when someone
else’s father stepped in & dragged
me off
leave me alone & mind y’r own
business i screamed
& he slunk off down his
driveway hands on hips –
telling me i was a little hooligan
while Michael ran for home
the following Sunday morning
i was walking home from the deli
smoking a Viscount Red
when Michael’s father spotted me
& drew his car to a halt
it was a brand new 1960 Holden Special
white with a tan flash
& it was gleaming
he jumped out & pointed his index
finger at me like it was a gun & started
ranting about how i’d belted his son
& how it better not happen again
i stubbed my cigarette out into the
unmade road & moved in on him
‘til we were eyeball to eyeball
i told him to get back into his car
or i’d give him what i’d given his son
surprisingly
he did as he was told
then drove away slowly . . .
yelling out all sorts of things
is it ever too late to apologise.
Filtered through Geoff Goodfellow’s uniquely powerful perspective, Preparing for Business captures growing up with a charismatic but damaged father, the aftermath of broken marriages – and parenting amidst the rubble, the working life of a poet (including prank calls from entitled students), and dealing with cancer – again.
And as a treat, there’s ‘Don’t Look So Glum’, a female-voiced version of his iconic masculine poem ‘Don’t Call me Lad’.