joanne burns: amphora

Rose Lucas

Published in September 2011, no. 334

Scatter

Rose Lucas

amphora
by joanne burns
Giramondo, $24.95 pb, 136 pp, 9781920882631

joanne burns has long been a force in Australian poetry. amphora, her thirteenth collection, builds on that legacy with the energy and vital idiosyncrasy with which readers have come to associate her work. The collection’s title – one of the sections of poetry – gives us a clue as to what we will find here. burns offers her reader an amphora, and thereby casts her book as a beautiful jar brimming with words and insights, stories from the past, sustenance for the present. William Carlos
Williams wrote, ‘… men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found [in poems].’ Drink deeply, amphora urges us, because poetry contains the very stuff of life.

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Published in September 2011, no. 334

Rose Lucas

Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (UWAP 2013) won the Mary Gilmore Award; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP 2016. She is currently completing her third collection, This Shuttered Eye. She teaches in Graduate Research at Victoria University where she also supervises in creative writing and literary studies.

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