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- Custom Article Title: Cassandra Atherton on Rose Lucas's 'Even in the Dark'
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William Carlos Williams once famously stated, ‘No ideas but in things’, about his poetic method. Rose Lucas, in her first poetry collection, Even in the Dark, takes up the imagist movement’s poetic style but ‘makes it new’ in her examination of the role of the poet in both the local environment and abroad. Her observant and mimetic style shimmers in a collage of confronting still-life portraits. In the opening poem, ‘Heat Wave, Melbourne’, the death of a possum – ‘her young / still alive in the pouch, / squirm and cling / to the dead fur / to each other’ – is juxtaposed with a tragic Darcey-esque West Gate Bridge moment when a father ‘unbuckles his small child / from the back seat / and / then / in the rush / hot / as she falls / through sky and / slick of water –’.
- Book 1 Title: Even in the Dark
- Book 1 Biblio: UWA Publishing, $24.95 pb, 128pp, 9781742585321
Entitled ‘Heatwave’, this first section is a crucible of visual memory. While the brilliant onomatopoeic ‘chk chk chk / of bore water sprinklers’ in ‘Country Swimming Pool’ provides some relief, ‘the long blast of afternoon heat’ returns until ‘The Coming of Rain’. However, it is the ‘Lake Mungo: Series’ that is most memorable for its foregrounding of the arid unearthing of the 40,000-year-old cremated remains of a woman. Reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Strange Fruit’, ‘Mungo woman’ is ‘wrapped in coracle of sand’ rather than peat bog, but both have long and tortured histories.
Divided into five sections – Heatwave, First Snow, Unmade, Jacaranda Time, and Window – Lucas’s poems are composed of vivid bursts of colour ‘gathering in the darkening air’. The title poem, ‘Even in the Dark’, is a Cummings-esque picture of his ‘a leaf falls on loneliness’, while her ‘Lip’ could be a response to ‘i like my body’. In a society concerned with the big things, Lucas takes us back to the importance of small things: ‘a chink of pale light, / the shift and slip of change.’
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