Monster Field

by Lucy Dougan

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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2022

Reviews

[Lisa Collyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The postwoman delivered Lucy Dougan’s new collection of poetry, Monster Field just half an hour before I left for the hills on residency. I had been anticipating its arrival to take with me. I read the spiel by Giramondo Publishing house, how the ‘familiar and uncanny’ converge in this tome stamped with a Banksia grandis leaf. A plant known and owned by me and bought purely for the leaf. I took my own cup, saucer and bowl and a pair of chopsticks even though I knew that KSP Writers' Centre would be well-stocked. But here’s the thing, things are imbued with emotions that comfort or provoke us. I could not choose which poem was my favourite in this bewitching collection. Is it ‘The Dolls’ that we hold onto into adulthood or bought on a whim as they ‘called to me’ but ‘frightened the children’. Or is it ‘The Monkey Face Bag’ ill-fitting for the growth of nieces but imbued with the interactions between the purchaser and the vendor, a girl of ‘indifference.’ ‘The horses I threw out’ on a fit of anger only to be longed for after the grief of non-possession of the gifter, but rather possessed by ‘my mother’ which you ‘stroked and stroked your jaunty angles’ a lost chance of clinging on. Lucy takes us to flight yet grounds us in place jolting us out of our time and space shift with directions for living ‘run, run for your life…flash your triangle all you like’ far more instructional than those learnt in Home Ec class. I sighed smiling when I finished reading this collection.

[Jehlish · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absorbing collection, with space for the joys and sorrows of living in our bodies, becoming older, memory as we become older, connecting to those around us in community and in misunderstanding, observing domestic and natural environments and cohabiting with animals and plants and weather and the small objects of everyday life.
Truly wonderful.
Consider the delights of a poem entitled "Features on Artistic Women Who Live by the Sea in UK Magazines" - gentle mockery that suddenly turns towards an invocation to freedom and art.

Or a line like "to your father / you were a boy in need of a forest."

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag of poems - some I liked a lot, particularly those about grief and domestic life, but others were mid for me. 3.5 stars

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filled to the brim with perimenopausal anthems. So many gems in here.