'If each life is a world, what is a world of billions of lives? Sweeping through evolutionary time, through the passage of ages, Rosanna Licari's Earlier looks back, applies its forensic gaze to an insistent, pervasive history of births and creations, human and other. Weaving threads and connections, Licari's poems investigate rich and diverse beginnings, awakenings, and endings too, celebrating lush, thriving, irrepressible life, both individual and collective. Thoughtful, curious, broad ranging, at times wondering, at times biographical, Earlier is an archaeology of poems to unearth and relish.' - David Ades, poet, host of Poets' Corner podcast series
'Rosanna Licari's collection Earlier is an elegant feast that pulses and throbs with vivid life. Perhaps the most powerful theme of the collection is that of hope, of survival and continuance in the face of uncontrollable forces, their scouring, purging power leaving their survivors naked as they step from burning rubble into the unknown future, bearing a seed of continuance and new life. Earlier's eloquent and discerning lyrical narratives are poems for now, with their wisdom and stoicism, their calm beauty in the eye of today's calamitous uncertainty.' - Melissa Ashley, author of The Birdman's Wife and The Bee and the Orange Tree
'Rosanna Licari's Earlier is a "bristling corpus" of extraordinary poetry, deeply rooted in intersectional environmentalism. There are blessings, valedictions and "molten metal-laced" poems of witness, devastation and ardour in this collection, exploring in diverse ways metaphysics, metamorphosis, evolution, new histories and ekphrasis. Superb, intimate and breathtaking in their expression of an ecopoetic community, Earlier is a wonderland of poems, where "The seed forms and anticipates / the unfurling dance / of germination."' - Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
'What an ambitious work Rosanna Licari has crafted - nothing less than a measure of evolution and history, her own book of Genesis and the life thereafter. Her poetry is erudite, precise in its turns of phrase, and always, in all ways, like the great storytellers of old.' - Felix Cheong, Singapore's National Arts Council Young Artist winner
'Rosanna Licari's poetry is as fecund as the natural world she often writes about. This is engaging and masterful work replete with a love of art and the natural world. Her landscapes are ancient and modern and her work is full of metaphysical possibilities while she also glories in the joy of the more prosaic activities such as doing laps in a swimming pool mind you even that has a transcendental dimension.' - Phil Brown, Arts Editor, The Courier Mail
'Rosanna E. Licari’s first multi-award-winning poetry collection, An Absence of Saints, UQP 2010, took both personal and public pasts into reimagined terrains. Her second, Earlier, Ginninderra 2023, builds on this focus of going back to explore, and to amplify existence in its various domains and manifestations. Her research is vast and in depth, including the Nāsadīya Sūkta (The Hymn of Creation, Rig Veda 10:129), a scientific discovery of a hominid named Lucy, and the harsh migration history of colonial Australia with the establishment of the Bonegilla migrant camp.' (Introduction)
'Books of poetry are usually more than a random dump of poems. They, like the poems they contain, tend to have a structure, sometimes loose and sometimes very tight. Its function might be positive: to show the poems up in the best light by putting the strongest ones first, for example. And it might be defensive: to resist a charge of randomness or to place poems near each other so that they give each other some support and deepen the context of any single work. Both these books – Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier and Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian – raise the issue of book structure: it’s likely to be one of the things that a reader notices early on.' (Introduction)
'Rosanna E Licari’s new collection is ambitious in scope and depth. This is Licari’s first major publication since An Absence of Saints (University of Queensland Press, 2010) which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the Anne Elder Award. The sixty-seven poems in this book transport the reader through the course of history from the stirrings of creation and the births of various life forms to accounts of the poet’s own beginnings, her family’s war torn past and the miracle of awakening each day to her subtropical Queensland surroundings. Hope and survival are constant themes.' (Introduction)
'Rosanna E Licari’s new collection is ambitious in scope and depth. This is Licari’s first major publication since An Absence of Saints (University of Queensland Press, 2010) which won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the Anne Elder Award. The sixty-seven poems in this book transport the reader through the course of history from the stirrings of creation and the births of various life forms to accounts of the poet’s own beginnings, her family’s war torn past and the miracle of awakening each day to her subtropical Queensland surroundings. Hope and survival are constant themes.' (Introduction)
'Books of poetry are usually more than a random dump of poems. They, like the poems they contain, tend to have a structure, sometimes loose and sometimes very tight. Its function might be positive: to show the poems up in the best light by putting the strongest ones first, for example. And it might be defensive: to resist a charge of randomness or to place poems near each other so that they give each other some support and deepen the context of any single work. Both these books – Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier and Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian – raise the issue of book structure: it’s likely to be one of the things that a reader notices early on.' (Introduction)
'Rosanna E. Licari’s first multi-award-winning poetry collection, An Absence of Saints, UQP 2010, took both personal and public pasts into reimagined terrains. Her second, Earlier, Ginninderra 2023, builds on this focus of going back to explore, and to amplify existence in its various domains and manifestations. Her research is vast and in depth, including the Nāsadīya Sūkta (The Hymn of Creation, Rig Veda 10:129), a scientific discovery of a hominid named Lucy, and the harsh migration history of colonial Australia with the establishment of the Bonegilla migrant camp.' (Introduction)
