Susan Hawthorne



Review Short: Susan Hawthorne’s Lupa and Lamb

Lupa and Lamb is a beast of a collection – it spans literally all of time and features every woman that has ever lived. Ambitious is not too strong a word. Curatrix, our guide and commentator, leads us through archives of lost women’s texts on the way to a party held by the Roman Empress Livia Drusilla. It is through this trail that Lupa and Lamb tells women’s histories and their multiple, often contradictory roles in family and society.

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Susan Hawthorne Reviews Robyn Rowland

Robyn Rowland’s poetry career spans thirty years, with her first book, Filigree in blood, appearing in 1982. Reading this volume of new and selected poems is a journey in memory, an almost autobiography. I first heard Rowland read in 1982 at the Sydney Women Writers Festival and I was very taken by her ability to phrase poems in just the right way so that a listener can follow and take in her meaning. Indeed, for some of her poems in this collection, it was as if I had Rowland’s voice in my head – no easy task for a writer to achieve that. It means that the rhythm or pace or vocabulary is just right.”

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