Join us to celebrate the launch of Monster Field, the new collection by award-winning WA poet Lucy Dougan.

Western Australia has a world-class poet on its hands in Lucy Dougan. – Kevin Brophy

In her poems of interiors and exteriors, of the familiar and quotidian, of controlled considerations of ‘the immediate’, Dougan is building a vision of meaningful survival, of continuance fused with change. – John Kinsella

Dougan’s poetry is profoundly youthful, alive with compassion and uncynical intelligence. – Lucy Van

This month, Giramondo is proud to release Monster Field, the new collection by the award-winning West Australian poet, Lucy Dougan. Drawing its title from a phenomenon coined by Surrealist artist Paul Nash, the collection engages and writes through that strange, elusive plane that exists on the extreme margins of perception and at the ‘intersection between the absolutely ordinary and the occult’.

Monster Field will have its official launch on Thursday 24th October upstairs at The Balmoral Hotel in East Victoria Park. The launch speech will be presented by Josephine Wilson, the Miles Franklin-winning author of Extinctions, followed by readings from the book by Dougan.

We are so excited to host this event! Copies of Monster Field will be available for purchase on the night, as well as Dougan’s earlier collections White Clay and The Guardians.

Light refreshments will be provided to guests, with a bar tab for early arrivals.

This event is free, but RSVP is essential. Please register through Eventbrite to attend.

*The Balmoral Hotel is an 18+ venue but minors may attend if accompanied by a guardian.

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ABOUT MONSTER FIELD

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.

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ABOUT LUCY DOUGAN

Lucy Dougan’s first poetry book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award. The manuscript of her second collection, White Clay, won the Arts ACT Alec Bolton Award – it was published by Giramondo in 2008. Her chapbooks Meanderthals (Web Del Sol) and Against Lawns (Picaro) were published in 2011. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), was shortlisted for both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. She works in the arts and university sectors.

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ABOUT JOSEPHINE WILSON

Josephine Wilson is a Lecturer in English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University. Her novel Extinctions (UWA Publishing, 2016) won the 2017 Miles Franklin Award, the Colin Roderick Award, and was nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literature Award. Her first novel was Cusp, (UWA Publishing, 2005). Her creative output includes performance, poetry, essay and reviews.

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