Even in the Dark is taking shape.

Here is the media release from UWAP:

ABOUT THE POET
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet, writer and academic and currently teaches poetry and editing at Victoria University, Melbourne. She is the co-author of Bridgings: Readings in Australian Women’s Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Lucas previously taught in the English department at Monash University for twenty years, and is widely published in the scholarly areas of women’s poetry, feminism, psychoanalysis and literary theory, and cinema studies. She is also currently Chair of the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. Her poems have appeared in Heat, Meanjin, Hecate, Best Australian Poems 2007 and 2009, and she was shortlisted for the ABR Poetry Prize in 2009. Even in the Dark is her first collection of poetry.
Media Release
July 2013
Even in the Dark
by Rose Lucas
In this, her first poetry collection, Rose Lucas distills years of writing into an impressive debut.
Even in the Dark contains delicate poems of the lives of women and the exquisite beauty contained in the act of observation.
Evoking luminescent images, Lucas explores nature and beauty, love and travel, in poems set at home and further afield.
The entire lifespan is present here: in vitro to last hours; bodies that develop and then age, captured in whisps of lovely images that can contain danger and risk.
‘These poems are eloquent, graceful and meticulously candid. Their subjects are often local — but Rose Lucas’s major concern is the universal, how life’s balance sheet of wins and losses plays out over changes in time and place. Her control of line patterns, the vigour and clarity of her perceptions, her poise and light-footed music pervade the book in moving ways. There is a questing, vulnerable sensuousness here, yet the overall spirit of her poetry is reverence and joy.’ — Judith Beveridge
UWA Publishing’s poetry list continues to advance the cause of keeping important Australian voices in print as well as new work from contemporary poets, such as Rose Lucas.
UWA Publishing
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley
Western Australia 6009
http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au
MEDIA ENQUIRIES
INTERVIEWS * EXTRACTS * IMAGES * REVIEW COPIES are available
please contact KIRI FALLS of UWA Publishing
tel: 08 6488 6806 or 0428 136 847
kiri.falls@uwa.edu.au
ISBN 9781742585321 $24.99 pb 128 pages

The launch is now scheduled for saturday august 10, at the Sun Bookshop/Theatre, 2 for 2.30 – so put aside that desire to go to the footy and come along! There will even be entertainment…

Here is another poem from the book, to keep you thinking:

New Born

 Slicked
back with creamy vernix,
you seem to me a
small wet seal,
wrapped tight in your white
cotton blanket.

I hold the bundle of your body
perfect
in my arms –

they were made for this,
they do it without thought
for anything –
            not even my naked,
bleeding body,
or the bustle,
            subsiding,
in the room behind me –

you watch me ,
still;
 together we learn the
words of
touch,
and warmth,
the language of our beating,
            proximate
hearts:

holding,
cleaving,
braiding and
spinning apart like the bright
            ribbons on the maypole,
their cords of rich colour
twisting
in the sun:

Little child,
            complex already,
your crinkled eyes,
   all dark pupils
under these dimmed lights,
fix
on me –