Penelope’s Chairs

$25.00 inc GST

Product Description

Elizabeth Lawson has been an abiding and important presence in Australian Literature, particularly Australian Women’s Literature, for many years. This collection makes available, for the first time, a representative and thematically diverse selection of her highly crafted, linguistically playful, witty and richly meditative verse.

It is a poetry of wide embrace: flowers, grasses, birds, reptiles, and mammals both of land and sea all find place and voice here. But not all such poems can be only celebratory: the connection is fragile, the fragility haunts, and we are often culpable.

Time and Love are governing principles too: places travelled to and through, lived and lived-in; people once-lost but always loved, people loved now and always. Many of these poems, rich in reference and allusion, reveal the poet’s love of literature, art, and music; all reveal the poet’s love of language and its possibilities, from the quirky to the caustic to the profound.

REVIEWS

THE AUSTRALIAN

“Lawson’s background as a literary scholar is evident in Penelope’s Chairs, which brims with allusions to and embedded quotations from the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Vaughan, Wordsworth and Hopkins.”

AIDAN COLEMAN, The Australian

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