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 'The Last Wave' by Gillian Best

March 2019, no. 409 • 28 February 2019

Gilian Best’s début novel, The Last Wave, is a thoughtful narrative that charts the intricacies of one family’s experiences and relationships across three generations, from the postwar period to the present. It makes use of the iconography of the coast and the unpredictability of the sea almost as a dramatis personae that motivates, consoles, and potentially threatens the characters in their ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Snake Like Charms' by Amanda Joy and 'The Herring Lass' by Michelle Cahill

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 25 May 2017

Michelle Cahill and Amanda Joy have produced two engaging and proficient collections of poetry. In their different ways, each revels in worlds of perception, imagination, and poetic craft. Amanda Joy’s first full-length collection, Snake Like Charms comes out of UWAP’s new poetry series and marks the emergence of an important voice in Australian poetry. In her work, Joy, who won the 2016 Pete ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Avalanche: A love story' by Julia Leigh

August 2016, no. 383 • 21 July 2016

When snow falls, it blurs the line of sight. Sometimes it covers the world with a soft blanket, dampening everything else; sometimes it chills to the marrow, taking a vulnerable human body to the limits of freezing. In Julia Leigh's moving memoir, Avalanche: a love story, the movement of snow correlates both to the clinical specificities of the IVF process which she experiences, and to the emotion ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Ground' by Martin Langford, 'Eating my Grandmother' by Krissy Kneen, and 'Now You Shall Know' by Jennifer Compton

March 2016, no. 379 • 25 February 2016

In their very different ways, these three collections attest that contemporary Australian poetry is alive, robust, and engaging. Puncher and Wattmann have delivered a generous collection of Martin Langford's most recent poems, Ground ($25 pb, 158 pp, 9781922186751). As we have come to expect from Langford, the voice we find here is strong – passionate and intellectual, intense and political. Th ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'The Lost Swimmer' by Ann Turner

October 2015, no. 375 • 30 September 2015

The Lost Swimmer is a novel full of movement, colour, and complex plot threads. Although this is her first novel, Ann Turner’s experience as a significant Australian film director and screenwriter has given her a tight grasp on the unfolding of narrative in sharply realised locations. The Lost Swimmer, an expertly scripted psychological thriller, deftly takes its multiple characters and possibil ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'The Mothers' by Rod Jones

June-July 2015, no. 372 • 28 May 2015

Rod Jones’s new novel, The Mothers, works on a number of levels. It provides a social and familial history of life in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs throughout the twentieth century while also telling the often moving stories of individuals connected across generations, usually mothers and children, battling to survive in adverse circumstances. The novel gives us a rich panoply of characte ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Palace of Culture' by Ania Walwicz

November 2014, no. 366 • 01 November 2014

Reading the poetry of Ania Walwicz is a little like being drawn into a trance: the density of the prose-like lines; the disorientation of the lack of punctuation; the repetition of certain words, phrases, alliterations. It is not a poetry that can be read in short bursts. Each poem is a commitment to a vision, to a mind-space explicitly shaped by the intensity and demand of Walwicz’s language. H ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Kin' by Anne Elvey

September 2014, no. 364 • 01 September 2014

Kin, Anne Elvey’s first full collection of poetry, brings together a wide range of poems full of light and the acuity of close attention. These poems focus on a world of inter-relationships where tree and water, creature and human, air and breathing, coexist – suggestive of an underlying philo-sophy of humility and acceptance. This is a world which envisions at least the potential of balance a ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Claustrophobia' by Tracy Ryan

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

The prolific Tracy Ryan’s new novel, Claustrophobia, is a smart and fast-paced hurtle through lust, obsession, and stultifying patterns of dependency and self-delusion. Written in a low-key, ironic style, Ryan borrows from tropes of crime fiction, in particular the novels of Patricia Highsmith, as well as the double-crossing figure of the femme fatale, to tell the story of Pen, a seemingly ordin ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Workshopping the Heart: New and selected poems' by Jeri Kroll

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

In Workshopping the Heart, Jeri Kroll brings us a feast of poetry: selections from her seven previous collections, poems from 2005 to 2012, and excerpts from her forthcoming verse novel, Vanishing Point. From 1982 to the present we are able to witness an evolution towards a mature poetic voice as Kroll negotiates her way through life’s various traverses and the poetic explorations that both desc ... (read more)