James Lucas

James Lucas was born in Sydney in 1965. He was educated at the University of New South Wales, where he won the University medal, and then Cambridge, where he completed a Ph D in modernist poetry in 1997. Since his first poetry publication in Southerly in 1994, his poems have appeared in Communion, Contrapasso, Cordite Poetry Review, Heat, Island, Meanjin, New England Review, Overland, Quadrant, Rabbit, Salt, Scarp, Southerly, The Shot Glass, and in the Henry Kendall Award, Newcastle Poetry Prize, and Australian Catholic University Prize anthologies. His previous volume Rare Bird was short-listed for the Anne Elder Award. For many years he has taught English at Sydney Grammar School. He is dismayed by the current vogue for Wallace Stevens.

www.jameslucaspoet.net

Author's books

Jack Mundey in Red Square by James Lucas
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Jack Mundey in Red Square

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‘Tea and cake with a Trade Unionist is strange….

… He’s the good sense, the tact not to say ‘scab labour.’

He’s arrangements to savour. This cup without sugar.’

 

James Lucas’ second collection suggests that the incongruous may be our best avenue to insight. These meticulously crafted poems reveal again and again that neither our pasts nor our present are as we’ve been told: that our past, as Faulkner noted, isn’t even past. In these poems tradition and the canon resonate in unexpected ways with contemporary life, so that we understand a sunflower more exactly with the help of Da Vinci and the Rolling Stones, and Kenneth Slessor offers us a window on Matthew Flinders and Aukus subs. In a volume of enormous thematic scope and formal range, Lucas finds for each idea the shape of best fit, be it sonnet, verse essay, or bento box.

Shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection 2026

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Rare Bird by James Lucas
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Rare Bird

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Intellectually ambitious and culturally engaged, these poems speak of  Sartre, Zola and Jackson Pollock, of Western Australia’s firewatch trees and Dubbo’s gibbons, of the poet-batsman Stevie Smith, of youth and age. Ranging in form, James Lucas’s poems ask to be reread rather than assented to, and are written in the belief that poetry is both solvent and fresh lick of paint.

‘James Lucas’s poems explode with brilliance, warmth and music’—  Stuart Barnes

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