AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Intense, dramatic, theatrical – an important new poetry collection which draws its strength from its confrontation with grief and mourning.
'As its title suggests, the poems in Autumn Royal’s The Drama Student explore theatrical responses to life. And in particular, the staging of the emotional life. The subject, a student of experience, and a writer with an uncertain future, feels her vulnerability and dependency. Grief is paramount among her emotional responses, provoked by hauntings of violence, the death of loved ones, the failure of relationships, the disappointment of her aspirations. The great fear: ‘I am threatened / with an exceptional ability and no means / of expression.’ The theatre provides those means, the expressive gestures, the subversion of typecast roles, the transformation of domestic objects into props for the performance of self, and the richness of language. Royal’s use of the elegiac form offers no answers, only the hope of tearing open conventional understandings of loss and insecurity, as it invokes a tradition of women poets and thinkers.' (Publication summary)
Notes
-
Author's note: For my muse
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Striking Parallels : Ekphrasis and the Body
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 455 2023; (p. 50-51)
— Review of I Have Decided to Remain Vertical 2022 selected work poetry ; The Drama Student 2023 selected work poetry
-
Striking Parallels : Ekphrasis and the Body
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 455 2023; (p. 50-51)
— Review of I Have Decided to Remain Vertical 2022 selected work poetry ; The Drama Student 2023 selected work poetry