Lehmann, Geoffrey 1940–

views updated

Lehmann, Geoffrey 1940–

(Geoffrey John Lehmann)

PERSONAL: Born June 20, 1940, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Education: University of Sydney, B.A., 1960, LL.B., 1963, M.A., 1982.

ADDRESSES: Home—8 Highfield Rd., Lindfield, New South Wales 2070, Australia.

CAREER: Practicing lawyer, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1963–76; C.R. Wilcox and Lehmann, Sydney, principal, 1969–76; University of New South Wales, Kensington, lecturer in law; Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers), Sydney, partner and tax counsel.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grace Leven Prize, 1966, 1982.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

(With Les A. Murray) The Ilex Tree, Australian National University Press (Canberra, New South Wales, Australia), 1965.

A Voyage of Lions and Other Poems, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1968.

Conversation with a Rider, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1972.

From an Australian Country Sequence, Poem-of-the-Month Club (London, England), 1973.

Selected Poems, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1976.

Ross' Poems, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1978.

Nero's Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero, Angus & Robertson (London, England), 1981.

Spring Forest, Collins/Angus & Robertson (Pymble, New South Wales, Australia), 1992.

Collected Poems, William Heinemann Australia (Kew, Victoria, Australia), 1997.

OTHER

(Editor) Comic Australian Verse, Angus & Robertson (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1972.

A Spring Day in Autumn (novel), Nelson (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 1974.

Australian Primitive Painters, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 1977.

(Editor, with Robert Gray) The Younger Australian Poets, Hale & Iremonger, 1983.

(With Cynthia Coleman) Taxation Law in Australia, Butterworths (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), 1989, 5th edition, Australian Tax Practice (North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia), 1998.

Children's Games, Angus & Robertson (North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia), 1990.

(Editor) The Flight of the Emu: Contemporary Light Verse, Angus & Robertson (North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia), 1990.

(Editor, with Robert Gray) Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Heinemann (Port Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 1991.

The Balloon Farmer (juvenile), Random House Australia (Milsons Point, New South Wales, Australia), 1994.

Sky Boy (juvenile), Random House Australia (Milsons Point, New South Wales, Australia), 1996.

Work represented in anthologies, including The Best Australian Poetry 2003, edited by Martin Duwell and Bronwyn Lea, University of Queensland Press (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Australian poet and writer Geoffrey Lehmann is also an attorney who specializes in tax law. His Taxation Law in Australia, written with Cynthia Coleman, has gone through several printings. In addition to Lehmann's own poetry, he has edited volumes of poetry by others and written a novel and books for children.

Lehmann is known for writing poems about the people and landscapes of his native Australia, as well as for several books of poems in which he speaks in the voice of characters that include Ross, an Australian farmer, and Roman Emperor Nero. An essayist for Contemporary Poets explained that, "though retrospective, Geoffrey Lehmann's spare, terse, deceptively simple poems are not mere exercises in nostalgia. Both the celebrations of Australian country lives … and the imaginative re-creations of antiquity … use the past as a vehicle for defamiliarizing and reflecting on the present."

Robert Adamson reviewed Collected Poems for the Australian Book Review, commenting on several of the entries from Lehmann's body of work. Adamson felt the best poems in this collection to be 'The Wandering Tattler" and "Pear Days in Queensland." "Lehmann can be seen," according to Adamson, "as continuing the ethos of the Sydney 'vitalist' school, celebrating 'pagan' values, vitality and considerations of 'quality above those of equality.'" The Contemporary Poets essayist found that Lehmann expressed a humanist ideal in his work, especially in those poems written in the voice of Australian farmer Ross. As the essayist explained, these "ruminative monologues" are "unpretentious, self-reliant, kindly, wryly humorous, capable of compassion for the underdog, [and] romantically convinced of the value of the simple things in life."