Biograph
John Foulcher graduated from Macquarie University with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours and a Diploma of Education. He has been a teacher in NSW and the ACT.
His work has been widely anthologised and published in national newspapers and journals including The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin, Quadrant, Heat, Poetry Australia and Meanjin.
His poetry is described by the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature as ‘simple, direct and convincing’. The poet and critic, Geoff Page, however, in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, warns against an overly simplistic view of Foulcher’s work: ‘It is tempting to classify John Foulcher as an imagist . . . When reading Foulcher’s work as a whole, however, it is soon apparent that his range is considerably broader than the imagist tag will allow.’ Robert Gray adds: ‘His theme . . . is a sceptical faith, complemented by the uneasiness of domesticity. It is the heroism of the modern, isolated individual – the man or woman who remembers to put out the garbage bin for fifty years . . . who stands on the nature strip and looks at the unbelievably violent furnaces that are the stars . . . and asks what place there is for the transcendent impulses that arise within us.’ (Poets and Perspectives: John Foulcher). Jeffrey Poacher concludes: ‘Foulcher’s work can be read as a determined effort to recover for poetry the inclusiveness that is now often associated with other art forms like fiction or cinema.’ (Australian Literary Studies Vol 19: John Foulcher’s Democracy).
From 1986 to 1994 his poetry was set for study on the NSW Higher School Certificate syllabus. He has been the poetry editor of both The Canberra Times and the Voices, the magazine of the National Library. In 2010, he was awarded a writer in residency in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts by the Literature Board of the Australia Council. His forthcoming volume of poems,The Sunset Assumption , is a response to that experience.
| Books |
| Light Pressure (Angus & Robertson 1983) Pictures from the War (Angus & Robertson 1987) Paper Weight (Angus & Robertson 1991) New and Selected Poems (Angus & Robertson 1993) The Honeymoon Snaps (Angus & Robertson 1996) Convertible (Ginninderra Press 2000) The Learning Curve (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002) What on Earth Possessed You (Halstead Press 2008) |
| Awards |
| Australia Council Residency at the Keesing Studio, Paris 2010-11 Australia Council Grant for Established Writers, 2003 Australia Council Young Writer’s Fellowship, 1980 Australia Council General Writing Grant, 1977 ACT Book of the Year Award, 1994: winner for New and Selected Poems National Library Poetry Competition, 1988: joint winner for ‘Kosciusko in Summer’ |