Rose Lucas

Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic. Her first poetry collection, Even in the Dark (UWAP, 2013) won the Mary Gilmore Award; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). Her most recent work is the poetry collection This Shuttered Eye (Liquid Amber Press, 2021) and the edited anthology Lockdown Poetry: The Covid long haul (Liquid Amber Press, 2021). She teaches in Graduate Research at Victoria University where she also supervises in creative writing and literary studies.

Rose Lucas reviews 'Ordinary Time' by Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy

December 2022, no. 449 • 25 November 2022

These strange years of pandemic and lockdowns certainly brought challenges and unusual experiences – those of constraint but also, surprisingly, of opportunity and richness. The curious spaces we occupy in the ether have become a seedbed for conversation and exchange; for connections that otherwise might not have found a field in which to prosper. Despite or perhaps because of the limits of the ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Ghostly Subjects' by Maria Takolander

February 2010, no. 318 • 07 October 2022

In Ghostly Subjects, her first book-length collection, Maria Takolander brings a sharp, wide-ranging voice to various themes of haunting. What, after all, does it mean for a subject to be ghostly? Takolander reveals a fasci-nation with the ways that surfaces of many kinds might be disrupted within the poetic text – for example, the ways in which the present can be interrupted by the pressures of ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Beginning in Sight' by Theodore Ell and 'Trap Landscape' by Nicholas Powell

September 2022, no. 446 • 27 August 2022

One of the many life-challenging things that poetry can do is to prise open unexpected spaces and take us somewhere entirely unanticipated, whether it be in terms of how we live, how we understand the world, or how we link the fabric of textual utterance with that of our lived experience. These two new poetry collections set about this labour of disruption in very different ways, demonstrating som ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Devotion' by Hannah Kent

January–February 2022, no. 439 • 22 December 2021

‘See, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.’ So begins Hannah Kent’s wide-ranging and poetic new novel, signalling its key themes of love, longing, and the pain that arises from division. While hands reach out, desperately seeking each other, Devotion explores the possibilities and the limits of such clasping. This is a powerful narrative that grapples with what connects ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Trigger Warning' by Maria Takolander, 'Rare Bird' by James Lucas, and 'The Hard Word' by Peter Kirkpatrick

August 2021, no. 434 • 26 July 2021

Trigger Warning by Maria Takolander University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 100 pp Maria Takolander’s fourth book of poetry, Trigger Warning, is a sharp and arresting collection, fierce in its emotions and determination to make language do the hard work of speaking that which hovers at the edge of articulation. This is a poetics that traces everywhere the lurking presence of the disruptive ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Grass Notes' by Sarah Day

April 2010, no 320 • 01 April 2010

The subtle beauty of the title of Sarah Day’s new collection of poetry, Grass Notes, epitomises the lightness of touch and intensity that characterises the poems. This is a collection of observing what might otherwise be seen as slight or glancing, yet that offers powerful prisms of insight. In a Whitmanesque mode, Day’s perspective not only looks up from the grass into the vastness of the wor ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Wow' by Bill Manhire, 'Biological Necessity' by Jennifer Maiden, and 'In This Part of the World' by Kevin Brophy

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

These three new poetry collections are works by established poets at the top of their game in terms of poetic craft and the honing of insights into both life and art. These are voices developed across a significant number of previous collections, allowing for an emergence of innovation, confidence, and ease of style and mood. ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Event' by Judith Bishop

November 2007, no. 296 • 01 December 2007

In her other life, Judith Bishop works as a linguist. A passionate concern with the intricacies of language, with the visceral effect of words on the tongue, aurally, and as they are knitted and unravelled on the page is manifest in her first collection of poems, Event. These poems are deeply immersed both in a complex observation of, and engagement with, the natural world, in particular with the ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Mother Tongue' by Joyce Kornblatt

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

‘When I was three days old, a nurse … stole me from the obstetrics ward … and raised me as her own,’ the voice of Nella Gilbert Pine tells us in the compelling opening of Joyce Kornblatt’s fifth novel, Mother Tongue. This is a moving contemplation on core elements of human experience: the complex connections between mothers and daughters, what it means to love and be loved. It is also an ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Dreams They Forgot' by Emma Ashmere

November 2020, no. 426 • 22 October 2020

A short story collection can have much in common with a collection of poetry, where each story pivots on attention to something particular and arresting – an image, a memory, the encounters with strangeness or beauty that can occur in a life. Individual stories build delicately towards such a moment, then fall away quickly, willing a reader to engage with feeling and suggestion rather than the c ... (read more)