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Lucy Dougan’s new collection draws on and is alive to the mysterious zone that Surrealist artist Paul Nash called the ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed which cannot be found again easily, and which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past your eyes’. Like a monster, ‘elusive and ubiquitous’ a poem is a ‘showing’ of what is both unsettling and familiar.
'In the world of everyday perception, mundane or discarded objects, fleeting scenes and inconsequential places can become unexpectedly charged with momentary significance and rise up as weird extremities in the field of the ordinary. Dougan’s ongoing concerns — the hidden or unperceived, things out of place, the intrusion of wildness into ordered spaces, in art and film, the shifting relationship between past and present — are deepened in this new collection by the disorientations of middle age: in experiences of survival, difficulty, and failure; in the presence and pressure of mystery; and in her conviction of what is sustainable in the making of things and in living' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Subtle Imaginations : Resistant Realities Three Recent Collections
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin , December vol. 82 no. 4 2023; (p. 172-179)
— Review of Monster Field 2022 selected work poetry ; Mourning Is Women's Business 2022 selected work poetry ; At the Altar of Touch 2022 selected work poetry 'As happens most years, there was a good haul of collections with energy, sustained craft and distinctive perspectives. Nothing explosive - no first performances of 'The Rite of Spring' - but poetry doesn't operate like that. It emerges, rather, through the bubbling accretion of the work of poets maturing at different times, pursuing different possibilities and inventing different styles to articulate them with. There were a small number of high-profile selections this year, such as Sarah Holland-Batt's excellent 'The Jaguar', a handful of Selecteds surveying the poetry of some who have been at the coalface for many decades - Alan Wearne, Jill Jones, Andrew Taylor - together with the regular offering of ambitious and thoughtful collections such as the books reviewed here, which inevitably only represent a selection of those that deserve attention.'(Publication abstract)
-
Lucy Dougan : Monster Field
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 21-27 January 2023;
— Review of Monster Field 2022 selected work poetry'The title of Lucy Dougan’s latest poetry collection quotes the surrealist artist Paul Nash, for whom the“monster field” is that “elusive and ubiquitous” place glimpsed in passing, which makes a profound impression but which cannot be easily found again.' (Publication summary)
-
Lucy Dougan : Monster Field
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Monster Field 2022 selected work poetry'Lucy Dougan’s fourth book operates in the same territory as the last two of its predecessors – White Clay and The Guardians – exploiting the unexpected perspectives of her distinct vision of the world. A good deal of the apparatus of the book – its title and the description included in the blurb which is transposed from the back cover into the half-title page – prepares us for this. Monster Field is an idea taken from Paul Nash to express worlds which are apprehended momentarily at the edge of vision and which have the power to disturb the preformed, edited view that makes up our sense of what is happening. I have a feeling that this is very much post facto. Lucy Dougan’s poetry has been interesting exactly because this has been her mode of operating and it’s a mode that enables her to escape conventional tropes and predictable interests and responses. She lives simultaneously in an ordinary and extraordinary world and anyone reading her poems would have picked this up without requiring any kind of critical apparatus (Creative Writing Project-style) as a support.' (Introduction)
-
Lucy Dougan : Monster Field
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Review , no. 17 2022;
— Review of Monster Field 2022 selected work poetry'Lucy Dougan’s fourth book operates in the same territory as the last two of its predecessors – White Clay and The Guardians – exploiting the unexpected perspectives of her distinct vision of the world. A good deal of the apparatus of the book – its title and the description included in the blurb which is transposed from the back cover into the half-title page – prepares us for this. Monster Field is an idea taken from Paul Nash to express worlds which are apprehended momentarily at the edge of vision and which have the power to disturb the preformed, edited view that makes up our sense of what is happening. I have a feeling that this is very much post facto. Lucy Dougan’s poetry has been interesting exactly because this has been her mode of operating and it’s a mode that enables her to escape conventional tropes and predictable interests and responses. She lives simultaneously in an ordinary and extraordinary world and anyone reading her poems would have picked this up without requiring any kind of critical apparatus (Creative Writing Project-style) as a support.' (Introduction)
-
Lucy Dougan : Monster Field
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 21-27 January 2023;
— Review of Monster Field 2022 selected work poetry'The title of Lucy Dougan’s latest poetry collection quotes the surrealist artist Paul Nash, for whom the“monster field” is that “elusive and ubiquitous” place glimpsed in passing, which makes a profound impression but which cannot be easily found again.' (Publication summary)
-
Subtle Imaginations : Resistant Realities Three Recent Collections
2023
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin , December vol. 82 no. 4 2023; (p. 172-179)
— Review of Monster Field 2022 selected work poetry ; Mourning Is Women's Business 2022 selected work poetry ; At the Altar of Touch 2022 selected work poetry 'As happens most years, there was a good haul of collections with energy, sustained craft and distinctive perspectives. Nothing explosive - no first performances of 'The Rite of Spring' - but poetry doesn't operate like that. It emerges, rather, through the bubbling accretion of the work of poets maturing at different times, pursuing different possibilities and inventing different styles to articulate them with. There were a small number of high-profile selections this year, such as Sarah Holland-Batt's excellent 'The Jaguar', a handful of Selecteds surveying the poetry of some who have been at the coalface for many decades - Alan Wearne, Jill Jones, Andrew Taylor - together with the regular offering of ambitious and thoughtful collections such as the books reviewed here, which inevitably only represent a selection of those that deserve attention.'(Publication abstract)
