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Rose Lucas

Rose Lucas

Rose Lucas lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri Country. She is a poet, critic and academic at Victoria University, Melbourne/Naarm; her most recent collection is Increments of the Everyday (Puncher and Wattmann, 2022). She is founding editor at Liquid Amber Press.

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)

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)
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