The Subject of Feeling
by Peter Rose
“Youth and maturity, love and infatuation, memory, music, loss, landscape, Peter Rose exposes the human experience in poems that are gorgeously lucid and often profound. The Subject of Feeling reveals a fearless wisdom, a wry wit and a quiet depth. These poems stop you in your tracks.”
Andrea Goldsmith
“The poetry of Peter Rose moves from classical Rome to contemporary Australia; from mordant comedy to moving elegy; from searing clarity to teasing obliquity. In his brilliant anatomies of the relationship between ‘art’ and ‘life’, the public and the private, Rose shows himself to be a master stylist. But style for Rose is not divorced from experience. Rather, experience is understood as, and through, style, a fact illustrated by the welcome new additions to the ‘Catullan Rag’, Rose’s caustic and hilarious ongoing satire of Australian literary life.”
David McCooey
“Peter Rose’s poems encapsulate a passionate vision of life, fusing sardonic wit, sophisticated irony and unsettling gestures. Through their innovative imagery the poems repristinate the mundane and the quotidian, transforming their experience into a unique revelation of the uncanny and the miraculous. It is the poetry of the ultimate sensations, crystalised in lucid formal transparency and imperceptible rhythmic patterns. It is finally the space where words show their love for the real, and besiege its secrets, with intensity and empathy.”
Vrasidas Karalis
AWARDS
Shortlisted - 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award (Poetry)
Praise for The Subject of feeling and Crimson Crop:
As with all accomplished poetry, the words here rise above the commonplace to allow you to view the world from a slightly higher plane
THE HERALD SUN
This neoclassical revision of contemporary literary life is hilariously caustic and it has the sting of the real in it, too … This complex to-and-fro of the mundane and the extra-mundane is undoubtedly one of Rose’s great themes. 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
With Crimson Crop … Peter Rose continues to offer his signature of loose and dense, intimate and alienating, challenging and evocative verse. The critical praise and accolades already garnered by this little volume add to Rose’s stacked trophy case, establishing further his reputation as a major figure in contemporary Australian belles-lettres … It is best if we let Rose candidly address us, for then he becomes not just a poet, but almost, as it were, a “Catullan” philosopher … Our spirit is pummelled page after page, according to a compounding measure, and the numbness can be mistaken for a quasi-ecstatic state … Rose’s emotional complexity compels us to go along with him but we are – by design – always stopped short … It is the strange pleasure accompanying the burning sting that keeps us turning the page … It is Rose’s relentless dialectic of emotion and critique – and his exposure of our own inauthenticities – that make this volume not only a delicate treat, but also, certainly, serious poetry.
CHRIS HACKETT, ARENA MAGAZINE
In transforming each poem to more than the sum of its parts, Rose repeatedly takes readers to places of uncertainty or ambiguity; and though he brings them safely in at each poem’s end, there is the unsettling feeling that this safety could be once again taken away.
AMY HILHORST, WESTERLY
Book details
PUBLICATION DATE: July 2015
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 124 pages
SIZE: 198 x 128 mm
ISBN: 9781742586885
RIGHTS: World
CATEGORY: Peter Rose, Poetry,