Rose Lucas

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)

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)