I am grateful to John Wolseley for permission to use this beautifully observed and realised image for my book cover. The title poem is, in part, a response to the artwork from which this detail is taken.

Rare Bird

Recent Work Press

Canberra, Australia

Copyright James Lucas, 2021

ISBN: 9780645008913

Reviewed: Australian Book Review August 2021

Commended: Anne Elder Award 2021. ‘This is a work of dexterity, musicality and invention.’

Cover Image: Untitled triptych (2002)- detail. Copyright John Wolseley, reproduced with permission

Use the link above to Recent Work Press to see their excellent range of Australian poetry titles.

‘James Lucas has cut and polished each poem to perfection in this astonishing first collection. He demonstrates compelling mastery of form, returning light and fire from each line the way a diamond disperses light from its internal facets. This is a poetry of rare wit, of linguistic fluorescence that few can match. Landscapes shimmer, the mined rough of experience becomes dazzling, the world shines. From the temperature and pressure of his intelligence and skill, Lucas has made this gem of a book out of the host rock of language. This is a book I’m certain will endure.’ Judith Beveridge

‘James Lucas’s poetry integrates intelligence and emotion, lyricism and wit and assurance. These poems effortlessly move from matters as diverse as the ordinary beauties of parenthood, cricket and jazz to the life of the mind and even the extraordinary challenges of mountain climbing. He does so with an easy, confident flourish, as if the poem had arrived fully formed. Most impressive, though, is his control of form: in his villanelles, sestinas and particularly his sonnets, he shows such a mastery of craft and fineness of touch. Lucas is, indeed, a rare bird’ John Foulcher

‘In the vivid Rare Bird, Aphrodite, Patrick White, Squirrel Nutkin and other ‘cognoscenti’ share binoculars, field guide, and camera. ‘Feather-wrapped’ but ‘body-piercing’ observations of the relationships between the worlds of humans and nature, of art, family, politics, sport and travel, of the dead, the living and the dying, yield beautiful and compelling ‘love songs on a loop’, pantoums, sestinas, sonnets, villanelles, amd more forms ‘born of origami folds’. James Lucas’s poems explode with brilliance, warmth and music’ Stuart Barnes

Jack Mundey in Red Square

Recent Work Press

Canberra, Australia

Copyright James Lucas, 2025

ISBN 9781763670181

Cover Image: Minnamurra River — Courage Tree — initial sketch. Copyright Drew Truslove, reproduced with permission.

James Lucas’ second collection suggests that the incongruous may be our best avenue to insight. These meticulously-crafted poems reveal again and again that neither our pasts nor our present are as we’ve been told: that our past, as Faulkner noted, isn’t even past. In these poems tradition and the canon resonate in unexpected ways with contemporary life, so that we understand a sunflower more exactly with the help of Da Vinci and the Rolling Stones, and Kenneth Slessor offers us a window on Matthew Flinders and Aukus subs. In a volume of enormous thematic scope and formal range, Lucas finds for each idea the shape of best fit, be it sonnet, verse essay, or bento box.