Reviews

‘Peter Rose is a master of those things that master us: Eros and Thanatos. In a world overrun with poetry that is respectful and puritanical, Rose writes like an intellectual libertine, radically reminding us that poetry should give pleasure, even as it may disturb or enlighten. The elegies, meditations, catalogues, satires, and odes that make up this collection range from the hilarious to the heartbreaking (often both), evoking moments that are equally replete with meaning and light as air. As an added bonus, the collection includes another instalment in “The Catullan Rag”, Rose’s wicked series in the style of the Roman poet Catullus. Appropriately, perhaps, I fell hopelessly in love with every poem in Attention, Please!’

David McCooey

 

The House of Vitriol (Picador, 1990)
‘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

The Catullan Rag (Picador, 1993)
‘I’m going to talk about why Peter Rose’s voice is so beautiful. It’s beautiful not just because of the felicitous phrases. It’s beautiful for much more Catullan reasons. It’s the pleasure of bitter honey or of sweet lemons. But above all I think what’s Catullan is the obliqueness of the verse, because obliqueness takes prisoners, not directness.’

Robert Dessaix

Donatello in Wangaratta (Hale & Iremonger, 1998)
‘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, Poetry Review

Rose Boys (Allen & Unwin/Text Classics, 2001)
‘A deep family story of suffering, love and passionate devotion, richly and freshly told.’

Helen Garner

Rattus Rattus: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2005)
‘Rattus Rattus may be recommended wholeheartedly: it offers an absorbing and distinguished body of work.’

Oliver Dennis, Times Literary Supplement

Crimson Crop (UWA Publishing, 2012)
‘This neoclassical revision of contemporary literary life is hilariously caustic and it has the sting of the real in it, too. But the literary life is also seen simply in the special aestheticisation of experience of which Rose is a master. Such aestheticisation occurs in his powerful imagery; his arresting, almost surreal phrases and in his extraordinary prosody and attention to sound.’

David McCooey, Cordite Poetry Review

The Subject of Feeling (UWA Publishing, 2015)
‘He writes brilliantly of the revelations of falling love, even though the experience probably contains the seeds of its failure … As Rose ages, memory itself becomes the subject of the poems rather than the event which is memorialised … It is hard to suppress the idea that a hidden link of loss between the two poets has somehow suggested the idea of inhabiting Catullus’s voice.’

Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review

About

Peter Rose has since 1990 made a distinctive contribution to Australian letters as a publisher, as the longest-serving Editor of Australian Book Review (since 2001), and as an award-winning author across several genres. His family memoir, Rose Boys (2001) won several awards, including the National Biography Award, and is considered a classic of Australian autobiography. His first novel, A Case of Knives (2005) was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Crimson Crop (2012), his fifth book of poems, won a Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. The Catullan Rag, his continuing series of elegies and satires in the style of the Roman poet Catullus, goes back to 1990. Attention, Please!, his seventh collection, is his first since The Subject of Feeling in 2015.