'With a painter’s deft touch inseparable from an awareness that every brush stroke matters, Rose Lucas’s This Shuttered Eye is a masterclass in the use of telling detail. The eye in the title of the collection looks ‘into the texture of the seen’ (p. 13), seeking ‘deep shades’ and how these are in turn captured by the looker’s ‘shuttered’ gaze, creating a haze between the visible and the invisible. Here the eye is akin to a camera that reveals both studium and punctum in a picture [1]. But here the eye also unshutters the outer and inner worlds as these are filtered through experience and in the process of writing.'
(Introduction)