Simon West

Simon West (born 1974) is an Australian poet. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Prickly Moses in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and a translation of the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. He lives in Melbourne, where he works as a translator and Italianist. Life Simon West was born in Melbourne in 1974. He grew up in Melbourne and Shepparton. He was educated at the University of Melbourne where he received the chancellor's prize in 2004 for his PhD in Italian Literature. He has lived for long periods in Turin and Rome and returns to Italy frequently. He was a lecturer in Italian studies 2007–2010 at Monash University, and has been an honorary research fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He is married with a daughter. Writing West's poetry is characterised by the presence of both the Australian and Italian landscapes. For Barry Hill in The Weekend Australian "his poems invoke the mouthing of words, love affairs with vowels, a sense of the foreign word well digested. The mood of his Italian landscapes reminds me of the modem Italian poet Eugenio Montale, just as his two poems after Guido Cavalcanti, along with the imagist lyrics that follow, call up the figure of Ezra Pound, that passionate disciple of Italy." Later he writes, "West's graphic power is wonderful, so that you feel, in all of his language moments, of this world." Martin Duwell in Australian Poetry Review has noted "a genuine fascination with the word, its sound, almost its taste in the mouth [and] that fascination continually alters the path of what might be, otherwise, predictable poems. The first poem in [First Names], 'Mushrooms' … demonstrates this theme of the tactility of language."