Crow College

New and Selected Poems

The dark aura of Emma Lew’s poetry has made her a compelling and mysterious presence for successive generations of Australian poets. Lew is highly regarded for the dramatic intensity of her poetry, which combines sudden shifts of voice and perspective with a heightened awareness of the moment. Her mastery of the ominous setting and the resonant line, and her command of poetic form – particularly the interior monologue, the pantoum and the villanelle – draw on a deep correspondence between the figure of the defiant narrator, volatile, dangerous, ironic, and the destructive forces of history. This selection brings together poems from her previous collections The Wild Reply, Anything the Landlord Touches and Luminous Alias, as well as twenty-four new poems not previously collected in book form. Crow College is introduced by award-winning poet Bella Li.

These piercingly abrupt yet formal poems balance on a precipice of daring, wryly burning with the offhand quick-witted resilience that is also the human condition.Gig Ryan

A vital and brilliant body of work.Bella Li

About the Author

Emma Lew

Emma Lew’s first collection of poems, The Wild Reply (1997), won the Mary Gilmore Award and was joint winner of the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her second collection, Anything the Landlord Touches (2002), won the Victorian Premier’s C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Queensland Premier’s Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry.

Reviews