Coda for Shirley

Coda for Shirley is the sardonic yet poignant sequel to Geoff Page's successful 2006 verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza. The earlier work presented an autumnal romance between an 82 year-old former 'ladies' man' and a 70 year-old widow who attracts his undivided, and unprecedented, loyalty. Sadly but amusingly, Lawrie's adult son and Shirley's two problematic daughters conspire to disrupt the affair. Coda for Shirley, set ten years later, starts with Shirley's decision to leave her money directly to her two grandsons rather than to her avaricious pair of daughters. Naturally enough, the daughters don't react well. Like its predecessor, Coda for Shirley is a romantic comedy, written throughout in Geoff Page's seemingly effortless rhyming verse. Geoff Page is a Canberra-based poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four previous verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier's Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into six languages. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand. Among his more recent books are: Agnostic Skies (Five Islands Press 2006), Eighty Great Poems from Chaucer till Now (UNSW Press 2006), Lawrie & Shirley:The Final Cadenza: A Movie in Verse (Pandanus Books 2007), Seriatim (Salt 2007) and 60 Classic Australian Poems (UNSW Press 2009).