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, Roses caustic and hilarious ongoing satire of Australian literary life. David McCooey Peter Roses 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
