Paper Bark Press
Photo: Alison Lendoudis
Gary Catalano
Gary Catalano was born in Brisbane in 1947, and died in Melbourne in December 2002.
Poetry and prose poetry books:
- Remembering the Rural Life, 1978
- Heaven of Rags: Forty Poems, 1978-1981, 1982
- Slow Tennis, 1984
- Fresh Linen, 1988
- The Empire of Grass, 1991
- Selected Poems 1973-1992, 1993
- Jigsaw, 1998
- Light and Water, 2002
Short stories:
- The Woman Who Lives Here and Other Stories, 1983
Art criticism books:
- The Years of Hope: Australian Art and Criticism, 1959-1968 1981
- The Bandaged Image: a study of artists' books, 1983
- An Intimate Australia: the landscape and recent Australian art, 1985
- Building a Picture: interviews with Australian artists, 1997
- The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and his Art, 2001
Gary was art critic for Art and Australia magazine from 1973, and art critic for The Age newspaper, Melbourne, from 1985-1990. He also published many reviews and literary articles, many on some lesser-known 19th and 20th century Australian poets. He was widely published for 30 years in all the major Australian literary magazines, as well as in the US, UK, Canada, France and Switzerland.
In 1992, he shared the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry with Kevin Hart. In 1997, he received a residency at the Australia Council's Keesing Studio in Paris. At the time of his death, he had almost completed his book of poems based on his residency there. In 2002 he had received the Harold White Fellowship from the National Library in Canberra to research his proposed biography of the poet David Campbell. He married writer Helen Hewitt in 1990, whose book Patrick White, Painter Manque was published by The Miegunyah Press in 2002. Les Murray has said of Gary that he was "the best prose poet in English."