Lupa and Lamb

Reviews

This collection is the ultimate in feminist poetry. Its breadth is mind-boggling, its vision grand ... Writing like this helps me believe that sexism — despite being so persistent and pervasive — is not insurmountable with so many voices speaking out against it. Writers like Hawthorne give me hope that women’s voices are growing with each generation, and that they will ultimately make themselves heard.

—Bronwyn Lovell, Lip Magazine

Susan Hawthorne, polyglot scholar and poet, invites you too to a party of countless women across the ages! The talk's torrential, the company fascinating, the cultural crossovers dizzying. Expect the unexpected - Pope Francis, Nauru, love-song and prayer, and Palaeolithic Lupa across the table.

—Judith Rodriguez AM

Who’d have thought that erudition could be so exotic, erotic and dazzlingly entertaining? In this triumphantly inventive excursion into feminist revisionism, Hawthorne is fully mistress of language and genre as she brings her Roman women into view in the diverse roles – lover, poet, prostitute, martyr – and the sometimes dark fates that await them as living instances of she-wolf and lamb.

—Jennifer Strauss AM

Lupa and Lamb begins with a descent into the unknown in the cave of the Sibilla Cumana, and then swirling through stars and constellations. Susan Hawthorne encompasses “la grande bellezza” (“sweet Roma where else would you want to be?”), leading us to the “emotional leap into other realms / a transit out of time into timelessness” “to find the unfound and unfindable”.

—Marina Morbiducci, Professor of English Language and Translation, Sapienza University, Rome

This vibrant collection of lyric poetry exhumes female ardour from among old male traditions. It asks us again and again why we are not open to the emotional rhythms that come down to us from the Aegean and from Rome: but also from mythic vibrations that were awake even far earlier. These poems ask us to wake up and live.

—Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM

Reading Susan Hawthorne's Lupa and Lamb, I was transported back to a time of wondering and wandering. Where bones and museum artefacts lose their dryness, become fully fleshed and whisper their stories intimately in your ear. Here the full pagan glory of Italy meets the inquisitive and absorbing gaze of Australian poet Susan Hawthorne’s eye. Heartbreaking, sensual and unexpectedly funny.

—Kavisha Mazzella AM, singer and songwriter

This collection is sublime. Read and you will be simultaneously transported and brought home. Read and you will know a history that is dense with women, with fragments that speak eloquently of the whole. Read and you will inhabit a corpus, and know yourself changed.

—Karina Quinn, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

Combining erudition with emotion and eroticism, intellect with imagination, Susan Hawthorne weaves women’s forgotten history into a magic web of remembering and re-imagining. With her playful juxtapositions of words, names, times, places and species, she shows there is freedom in not forgetting, and that the world could have been – can be – different.

—Robyn Arianrhod, author of 'Seduced by Logic'

Susan Hawthorne has created a wonderfully rich imaginative poetic tapestry, weaving together fragments of lost and found memories, mythology, archaeology, ancient languages and modern cosmology.  An erudite feminist, once again thought provoking and fun.

—Meryl Waugh, PhD (Astrophysics), University of Melbourne

Lupa and Lamb which follows the root and transformation of languages through their own transmigration, is more than poetry, more than history, more than a mnemonic tool which can assists the initiated in re-engaging with women centred psychology. At the core of Lupa and Lamb is a treatise in confronting and understanding the self in the present, through a panoramic prism of the mythical past.

—Lella Cariddi, poet, artist, curator

Inspired by her residency at the Whiting Studio in Rome, Susan Hawthorne's Lupa and Lamb explores the mysteries of ancient sites and treasures in Rome and nearby countries, linking the past with the present, and collecting hidden treasures the archaeologists have missed. Poems, plays and 'lost texts' of women through the ages are presented in words and imagery that offer sensual and intellectual delights. This is ‘translation’ in its widest sense - a collection to be treasured and reread.

—Elaine Lewis, author of 'Left Bank Waltz'

Susan Hawthorne has created a lovely, lively combination of leaning, intellect, passion and fun in Lupa and Lamb. Both profound and playful, these poems entertain, uplift and inform. Curatrix’s offering at the beginning and the end are a particular delight. 

—Pat Rosier, author of 'Where the Heart Is'

Hawthorne is a master-weaver. Her sixth book of poetry takes strands of myth, history, and new inventions to make a strong fabric of sisterhood.

—Heather Taylor Johnson, Rain Taxi

Lupa and Lamb takes readers on a compelling metaphorical ride across time and space that is enchanting and exhilarating, ever more so because it is grounded in Hawthorne's deeply female sensibility and her in-depth knowledge of women's herstory from Paleolithic times to the present.

—Mary Saracino, Goddess Pages

This is a vast, instructive and impressive collection by Susan Hawthorne, and a grand addition to her oeuvre. Part mythology lesson, part spirited imaginings, we are immersed in many chapters in the story of women as we laugh in the faces of those who seek to silence us.

—Jessica Alice, Cordite poetry Review

Susan Hawthorne’s words honour ancient inspirations, revive and celebrate the past and transport the reader to new horizons.

—Powhiri Wharemarama Rika-Heke, Learning Leader, Social Sciences, Alfriston College

Reading Lupa and Lamb is not like opening Pandora’s box. The treasures released: poetry that redeems the voices and torn whispers of millennia of women, give only delight. Playful Curatrix eases us through ancient languages, myths and the intricate details of love and lust.  Always we are reminded that poiesis is fabrication, creation and re-making; this is how the past can be found and reworked into divine gifts.

—Lyn Hatherly, author of 'Acts of Abrasion and Sappho’s Sweetbitter Songs'

Read this book many times, and aloud to each other: in this way you may enjoy the journey that it is, and help bring the archaic future into being.

—Glenys Livingstone, Return to Mago

Lupa and Lamb is esoteric yet accessible, especially to Goddessians and feminists; many of the topics and characters in the book will be familiar to those knowledgeable about mythology and women’s history.

—Judith Laura, Medusa Coils

A swirling celebration, told in free verse, of ancient goddesses and strong women from myth and history meeting, exploring, talking and loving... I used to say that I seldom read and liked poetry, but Susan Hawthorne and Spinifex Press are changing that.

—Me, you, and books

'The tone of this text is optimistic. “One by one, change comes” This hope is helped along by the fine dashes of humour that spice this serious book.'

Lupa and Lamb, Susan Hawthorne’s latest pithy collection of poetry, continues her work to break down the separations between humans and nonhumans, with the lyrical savvy that marks her previous collection, Cow.

—Susan Pyke, Plumwood Mountain

Hawthorne’s creativity transcends academia and scholarship. She wields images and emotion deftly, creating a thing of grace and beauty exquisitely balanced between scholarship, cultural history, a linguist’s pyrotechnics, poetry, and theater.

—Donna Snyder, Red Fez

… a complicated and dense book. Wonderfully written and so much depth in it.

 —Robyn Rowland AO, author of 'Seasons of Doubt and Burning'