Simon West Simon West i(A82650 works by)
Born: Established: 1974 Melbourne, Victoria, ;
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 The Bird’s Head : Prose That Makes Eye Contact Simon West , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 464 2024; (p. 51)

— Review of Birds and Fish : Life on the Hawkesbury Kindle Edition Robert Adamson , 2024 selected work poetry prose

'In the year leading up to his death, the poet Robert Adamson (1943-2022) gathered together a selection of his work that focused on one of his enduring passions: the birds and fish of the Hawkesbury River, beside which Adamson lived much of his life. Adamson was best known for exploring this passion in poetry, but the pieces collected in this new book are works of prose and include selections from Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out (2004), and from his late collection, Net Needle (2015). They also include material that is likely to be less familiar to readers, pieces published in the magazine Fishing World, and extracts from a journal Adamson kept between 2015 and 2018 titled ‘The Spinoza Journal’.' (Introduction)

1 3 y separately published work icon Prickly Moses : Poems Simon West , Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2023 26845994 2023 selected work poetry

'An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly twenty years. In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking. West’s intensely regional focus stands in dialogue with Europe and antiquity. Landscapes reveal the tangle of their historical dimensions, as the rivers of both the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia and the Po Valley in northern Italy merge and flow into the wider currents of the Southern Ocean. Again and again, language and the senses throw themselves into the nameless riot of the world, from eucalypts and clouds to a medieval bell tower and the sounds a pencil makes as it crosses a page.' (Publication summary)

1 1 Swimming i "Too neat for ghosts the borrowed house was", Simon West , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 5 September 2020; (p. 18)
1 y separately published work icon Dear Muse? Essays in Poetry Simon West , Waratah : Puncher and Wattmann , 2019 17213228 2019 selected work essay

'Does it make sense to invoke the Muses today? Few of us believe our poems will be better for praying to stola-clad women sitting on a mountain in Greece. This book asks the reader to consider the Muse as something more – a vehicle for acknowledging cultural legacies that radiate out from the past and into contemporary Australia. In addressing the Muses we talk to that inheritance. In these essays Simon West examines our metaphors for reaching back after inspiration. Rather than cultural rubble ripe for plunder, he celebrates our waterways in imagining that heritage, rivers that nourish the red gums across floodplains. In doing so he ranges widely, bridging Classical and European interests with a celebration of Australian poets, while asking, always, where is Parnassus now?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 1 y separately published work icon Carol and Ahoy Simon West , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2018 16549409 2018 selected work poetry

'The backdrop of Carol and Ahoy is the Goulburn River and its floodplains around Shepparton. Ancestry and watchful reflection combine seamlessly in these poems, which are always in search of "what is tactile and particular", be it a gum tree, an agave or the past. Simon West's fluid, ever-shifting gaze will be familiar to readers of his previous volumes.' (Publication summary)

1 The Broken River i "We lived across from parklands where the Broken", Simon West , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 31 no. 2 2017; (p. 429-430)
1 A Goulburn Valley Eclogue i "—Johno, these oaks you planted have come on well.", Simon West , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 77 no. 2 2017; (p. 206-209)
1 The Water Track i "Never a straight line or a single course,", Simon West , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 77 no. 2 2017; (p. 204-205)
1 Oracles and the Intellect : James McAuley in the Centenary of His Birth Simon West , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2017;

'‘It was a pretty idle afternoon in Victoria Barracks’, McAuley would later say. ‘I suppose we must have started about lunchtime.’ What followed is well known. In October 1943 two young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the fictitious poet Ern Malley, whose slim manuscript of surreal poems, The Darkening Ecliptic, they sent to Max Harris and his magazine Angry Penguins. The idea was to ridicule this new movement of ‘garish images without coherent meaning and structure’. McAuley famously described how,'  (Introduction) 

1 Waves of Continuity and Change Simon West , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 8 April 2017; (p. 22)
'In the new anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry, published by Puncher & Wattmann, the editors make strong arguments for the cultural importance of poetry today. They celebrate how, for example, our poets continue to help us understand the natural environment not as a background for literature but as a complex presence in our lives.' (Introduction)
1 A Plein-Air Artist Reflects on Timing i "It was a cool summer afternoon.", Simon West , 2016 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Best Australian Poems 2016 2016; (p. 172)
1 Concerning Timing i "It was a cool summer afternoon.", Simon West , 2015 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 28-29 November 2015; (p. 30) The Saturday Age , 28-29 November 2015; (p. 30)
1 5 y separately published work icon The Ladder Simon West , Glebe : Puncher and Wattmann , 2015 9036582 2015 selected work poetry

'The Ladder is Simon West’s third collection of poetry, and his first in four years. Many earlier preoccupations return—the natural environment, Italian art, the dimensions of place. There is a new focus on worldly and artistic responsibility, and a fascination with the ‘certain poise’ of ‘being in between’. At the collection’s heart are the building blocks of language, along with the more literal ones of Rome, where some of these poems were written during a residency at the Whiting studio in 2012.' (Publication summary)

1 Service Overdue i "I fill a Church with hostages. Their faces", Simon West , 2015 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , April no. 140 2015; (p. 111)
1 An Encounter i "Unreal city, still. By default. An then", Simon West , 2015 single work poetry
— Appears in: Island , April no. 140 2015; (p. 111)
1 Roman Triplets Simon West , 2015 sequence poetry
— Appears in: Island , April no. 140 2015; (p. 111)
1 Hail Guns in the Goulburn Valley i "On summer evenings storms brewed over orchards'", Simon West , 2015 single work poetry
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 75 no. 1 2015; (p. 105)
1 The Mallee Singer i "It was poor land: riverless, salt bush country", Simon West , 2015 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23-24 May 2015; (p. 18)
1 Great Poem Hoax Simon West , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , March 2015; The Australian Face : Essays from the Sydney Review of Books 2017; (p. 146-161)

— Review of The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood Gwen Harwood , 2014 selected work poetry

'In August 1961, the Melbourne newspaper Truth ran the headline GREAT POEM HOAX: HOUSEWIFE FOOLS THE EXPERTS WITH HER NAUGHTY SONNETS. The page three article began:

A Tasmanian poet-housewife has become the centre of a literary storm because of two sonnets she sent to a magazine as a hoax. The sonnets concealed a message – and a rude word – in words from the first letter of each line. The poet is Mrs Gwen Harwood, of Hobart, wife of a University Tasmania lecturer … The first sonnet said ‘So long, Bulletin’. The second gave an earthy and uncomplimentary opinion of all editors.'

  (Introduction)

1 Fresh Appreciation of a Poet of Urban Reality Simon West , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 25-26 October 2014; (p. 20-21)

— Review of Collected Poems : Lesbia Harford Lesbia Harford , 2014 selected work poetry
X