Rattus Rattus

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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 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' 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.