At the centre of Crimson Crop is a sequence of elegies.

Several return to Rose’s father, Bob Rose, and continue the familial reckoning begun in his memoir Rose Boys. But the collection is not solemn in any obedient sense. Grief sits beside travel, sex, literary gossip, music and art, making for controlled but restless poems.

They can move from intimacy into satire without warning, or let a remembered room, journey or argument become the architecture for a much older loss. The collection also includes new instalments in his “Catullan” sequence: adaptations of Catullus used to expose rivalry, vanity and cruelty within contemporary literary life. The result is a book in which cultivation never quite suppresses appetite, spite or mourning. 

This was Rose’s fifth poetry collection and won the Queensland Literary Award, while also being shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. It is a strong entry point into his work: urbane, caustic, learned and far more vulnerable than its composure initially suggests.

UWA Publishing, 2012 first edition paperback. Light shelf wear; clean and sound.