Lucy Dougan

The award-winning West Australian poet’s new collection draws on and is alive to the mysterious zone that Surrealist artist Paul Nash called the ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed which cannot be found again easily, and which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past your eyes’.

Many poems in this book explore the consolations that ‘the wild’ offers to the subjects of late modernism. The work is interested in the ways in which the past continually intrudes on the present, in all kinds of atavism, and in the ways in which pockets of wildness in built environments are a source of liveliness and a dark sort of energy.

A complex awareness of family life is at the heart of Lucy Dougan’s new collection.

Its narrative interweavings lead us from the world of books and romance into motherhood and its immersion in the world of children, then summon up, in turn, the poet’s own childhood, and its barely recognised estrangements, ‘the father that I did not know’, and later a whole new family, to be reclaimed as her own.

Dougan’s poems are alive to the intimations which exist at ‘the fugitive border of thought’, and celebrate the imagination’s power to mould, to recover, and to repair.