Intellectually ambitious and culturally engaged, these poems speak of Tarantino and Sartre, of Zola and Jackson Pollock, of Western Australia's firewatch trees and Dubbo's gibbons, of the poet-batsman Stevie Smith, of youth and age. Ranging in form from free verse to sonnet, sestina and villanelle, James Lucas's poems ask to be reread rather than assented to, and are written in the belief that poetry is both solvent and fresh lick of paint.
