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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 ‘Phallic Panic: Film, horror and the primal uncanny’ by Barbara Creed

March 2006, no. 279 01 March 2006
What is a monster? Why are we so recurringly fascinated by graphic representations of the monstrous? And, in particular, what do cinematic images of male monstrosity tell us about the ways in which Western culture produces and views the categories of masculine and feminine?  Barbara Creed’s new book is a direct extension of much of the lively work she did in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Fe ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews ‘The Flower, The Thing’ by M.T.C. Cronin and ‘The Last Tourist’ by Jane Williams

August 2006, no. 283 01 August 2006
What shapes might poets use to house and craft their various perceptions? Given the absence of a narrative framework, particularly within lyric poetry, what are the possible images and contents through which poetry might weave its insights, and thereby build a tangible structure able to communicate the ephemera of experience and idea? In her most recent collection of poems, M.T.C. Cronin, surely o ... (read more)

Window by Rose Lucas

December 2006–January 2007, no. 287 04 January 2024
See, how this slow tide tugs and sighs against the flank of patient night – the driving pulse that aches towards the fleck of dawn then shifts, and curls around skin’s soft warmth, that quiet space – See how all things might be refracted here in this small round, in this brief threading of a needle’s eye, how all the waiting world might be quilted and unravelled here. ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'Selected Poems' by Lesbia Harford

September 2023, no. 457 27 August 2023
In her short life, Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) created a body of poems which have become increasingly important to scholars and poets in understanding both the impact of poetic modernism in Australia and shifting concepts of gender, class, and the tensions between a personal and a collective politics. While Oliver Dennis’s 2014 Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford presents Harford’s full oeuvre, ... (read more)

Rose Lucas reviews 'House of Longing' by Tara Calaby

June 2023, no. 454 23 May 2023
Tara Calaby’s début novel, based on her doctoral studies, wears its clearly extensive research lightly as it weaves an engrossing story of a young woman’s struggle in 1890s Melbourne towards something a contemporary reader might call social, emotional, and sexual independence. Focused around the story of an individual, House of Longing also traverses a broad canvas of social issues – class, ... (read more)

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)
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