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Peter RoseRattus RattusNew and Selected Poems |
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Biographical note: Peter Rose grew up in rural Victoria. After studying at Monash University and working as a bookseller, he moved to Oxford University Press and was a publisher there throughout the 1990s. He is currently the Editor of Australian Book Review. His first collection of poetry, The House of Vitriol, appeared in 1990, and was followed by The Catullan Rag (1993) and Donatello in Wangaratta (1998). His poetry and criticism have appeared in various anthologies. In 2001 he published a memoir, Rose Boys, which won several prizes, including the National Biography Award. His first novel will appear in 2005.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844710690
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PAPERBACK
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Short
description/annotation: Rattus Rattus combines Peter Rose’s latest poetry with almost 100 poems from his first three collections, which have made him one of the most individual voices in Australian poetry. Rose’s poetry, always intimate and challenging, ranges from personal subjects and private epiphanies to the satirical and the mordant. Readers of this long-awaited Selected Poems will particularly enjoy his continuing series of Catullan satires.
Main description: When Peter Rose published his first book of poems, The House of Vitriol, in 1990 Peter Porter welcomed it thus: ‘Nothing I have read in contemporary poetry in Britain, the States and Australia quite prepared me for the impact of Peter Rose’s book … Rose is out to stir the settled waters of poetry.’ That collection went on to become one of the most celebrated first books of the 1990s published in Australia. Since then, Rose’s poetry (sardonic, cosmopolitan and witness to the sadness of things) has continued to range across a variety of personal and satirical subjects. His voice, in the new poems that open Rattus Rattus, evinces a new opennness and intimacy, while still encapsulating in individual and arresting forms the tenuousness of things, the fragility of bonds, and metaphysical estrangement. Elsewhere, in the best-selling memoir Rose Boys, Peter Rose has written about family and the difficulties that afflicted one celebrated Australian family, so it will be fascinating for readers unfamiliar with his poetry to encounter the memoirist in a different guise. To ‘I Recognize My Brother in a Dream’ (an early poem that informed Rose Boys) he adds a new long poem about his late brother and father, ‘Ladybird’. Rose also goes on adding to an early series of satirical poems in the Catullan style, titled ‘The Catullan Rag’. In this new book we can enjoy almost twenty of these satires of contemporary literary society, of which Geoff Page remarked, ‘It is as if Catullus had somehow resurfaced from Caesar’s Rome with all his powers intect’. No one with a serious interest in modern Australian poetry will want to miss this sophisticated, elegiac and witty Selected Poems.
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Excerpt from book: Rattus Rattus
Review quote: Nothing I have read in contemporary poetry in Britain, the States and Australia quite prepared me for the impact of Peter Rose’s book The House of Vitriol. To be infinitely knowing, yet engagingly vulnerable, to exceed so happily that succeeding becomes of secondary consideration, and to entertain so hugely — Rose is a real shock to the system. Peter Porter
Review quote: These are utterly beguiling poems of elegiac lyricism, in which Cavafy wanders among the crepuscular barbecues with Catullus and Leopardi. Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Review quote: Peter Rose repeatedly proves the possibility of elegance within free verse. His technique lends his poems the kind of suppleness — a posture of ease — that we find in poets like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Brian Henry |
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