Goldsworthy, Peter
GOLDSWORTHY, Peter
Nationality: Australian. Born: Minlaton, South Australia, 12 October 1951. Education: University of Adelaide, South Australia, B.Med. and B.Surg. 1974. Family: Married Helen Louise Wharldall in 1972; two daughters and one son. Career: Since 1974 medical practitioner in Adelaide. Awards: Commonwealth Poetry prize, 1982; Anne Elder prize, 1983; South Australia Biennial literary award, 1984, and poetry prize, 1988; Australia Council fellowship, 1984, 1986, 1990–91. Agent: Curtis Brown (Australia), P.O. Box 19, Paddington, Sydney, New South Wales 2021. Address: 28 Burwood Avenue, Nailsworth, South Australia 5083, Australia.
Publications
Poetry
Readings from Ecclesiastes. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1982.
This Goes with This. Crows Nest, New South Wales, ABC, 1988.
This Goes with That. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1991.
Wish. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1995.
If, Then: Poems and Songs. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1996.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. Pymble, New South Wales, Harper Collins, 1996.
Novels
Maestro. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1989; London, Bloomsbury, 1990.
Honk If You Are Jesus. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1992.
Magpie, with Brian Matthews. Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1992.
Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. Pymble, New South Wales, Harper Collins, 1999.
Short Stories
Archipelagoes. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1982.
Zooing. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1986.
Bleak Rooms. Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1988.
Little Deaths. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1993.
Selected Stories. Pymble, New South Wales, Flamingo, 1997.
Other
Navel Gazing: Essays, Half-Truths, and Mystery Flights. Ringwood, Victoria, and New York, Penguin, 1998.
Editor, with Larry Buttrose, Number Three Friendly Street: Poetry Reader. Adelaide, Adelaide University Union Press, 1979.
*Manuscript Collection: Australian Defense Forces Academy Library, Canberra.
Critical Study: The Ironic Eye by Andrew Reimer, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1994.
Peter Goldsworthy comments:
Poetry to me is the nearest words can approximate to thought and to "the mixture of the world and ourselves" (Merleau-Ponty) that we inhabit.
* * *For a poet with a sparse output, Peter Goldsworthy made an impressive contribution to Australian poetry beginning in the 1980s. His first collection, Readings from Ecclesiastes, was published in 1982 and received several major prizes, and it is easy to see why. In a period when the last excesses of 1970s rhetoric and gesture still troubled the air with defiance and self-consciousness, Goldsworthy's poems were taut, disciplined, and sharp as a scalpel. Their wit implied an observant mind, yet they were powerful in a way that outpaced mere cleverness. Goldsworthy was not to be classified with any prevailing groups or coteries, though it might be possible to perceive antecedents in certain poems of Peter Porter or some of the Melbourne poets of the 1960s and 1970s.
Publication of Goldsworthy's second collection, This Goes with This, during the Australian bicentenary year in 1988 marked a return to verse after several years of writing short fiction. The short poems in the new book certainly consolidated Goldsworthy's name as an incisive writer and a skilled dissector of human (and other) foibles. "A sparkling volume," Les Murray called it, and that it is, but as the title poem also suggests, even though "this goes with this goes with this / and always will," the mature analyst discovers that "knowledge is no cure, or escape."
A volume of selected poems, titled mischievously This Goes with That, was published in 1991 and included work composed in the previous twenty years, though the total selection in effect reprinted the two earlier books. In 1992 the National Library of Australia issued the pamphlet After the Ball. Goldsworthy's knowledge of classical music reinforces some of the later poems, which therefore act as a sort of counterpoint to his acclaimed novel Maestro.
—Thomas W. Shapcott