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The guardians

by Lucy Dougan

This poetry collection explores the intersection of nature, memory, and family life in urban and suburban settings. Dougan examines generational bonds and the presence of the past through a quiet, observational lens.

Accession 9781922146755 ISBN 9781922146755 Publisher Giramondo Publishing Company

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position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:12
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spine_text: Lucy Dougan The Guardians GIRAMONDO

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Topics and Themes

1. **Memory, Loss & the Weight of the Past**
The collection is deeply preoccupied with memory — not as a clean act of recollection, but as something that intrudes, distorts, and haunts. Each poem draws on absence — who isn't there, what has been sloughed off — to give shape to the present moment. Ordinary objects like a pair of shoes or a linen mask become portals to layered personal histories.

Connect to books about: elegy, grief and mourning, memoir and autobiography, the phenomenology of memory.

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2. **Family Bonds, Genetic Inheritance & Intergenerational Connection**
A strong structural thread runs through the maternal and familial — mother and daughter, father and daughter, sisters, grandparents — exploring the ties that link the living and the dead across generations. The first section of the collection focuses especially on genetic inheritance and bonds between women.

Connect to books about: matrilineal history, family saga, feminist genealogy, intergenerational trauma.

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3. **Illness, Mortality & the Body**
A series of poems at the heart of the collection narrates an experience of breast cancer, confronting the vulnerability of the physical body alongside the age-old themes of mortality and transience. These poems approach a weighty subject with characteristic restraint and quiet intensity.

Connect to books about: illness narratives, cancer memoirs, the body in literature, mortality and the art of dying.

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4. **Place, Home & the Uncanny Domestic**
Houses, ruins, old buildings, and revisited places recur throughout. The domestic space is portrayed as something shared across time — inhabited by the living and the dead simultaneously — giving rise to an uncanny sense that one might be a ghost in one's own home. Loss of place emerges as an ethically charged theme, pushing against ideas of ownership and territorial belonging.

Connect to books about: the uncanny, architecture and memory, psychogeography, belonging and displacement.

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5. **The Natural World, Wildness & Human–Animal Relations**
Alongside the domestic, the collection insists on the presence of wild, untamed nature within built environments — feral animals, overgrown riverbanks, blackberry patches — as a source of dark energy and vitality. The poems explore bonds between humans and animals as a form of guardianship.

Connect to books about: ecological poetry, human–animal relations, rewilding, urban nature writing.

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6. **Atavism & the Pull of Instinct**
The book is drawn to the idea of atavism — the way archaic traits, instincts, and ways of being resurface unexpectedly in the present. These are the things we cannot fully civilise or suppress: they return as memory, wild impulse, or regret for paths not taken.

Connect to books about: evolutionary psychology, depth psychology (Jungian), mythology and the unconscious, anthropology of behaviour.

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7. **Guardianship, Custodianship & Ethical Care**
The title's central question — *how do we watch over and care for what we love?* — runs through the entire collection. Dougan imagines guardianship not as ownership or permanence, but as a transitory, uncertain custodianship: of people, places, animals, and the past. This idea takes on a broader ethical and even postcolonial dimension in the context of place and land.

Connect to books about: ethics of care, environmental stewardship, postcolonial land rights, custodianship philosophies.

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8. **Australian Poetry & the Lyric Tradition**
As a Western Australian poet working in a spare, luminous free-verse tradition, Dougan engages with a distinctly Australian lyric lineage — influenced by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and artists like Richard Long — while situating her work within the landscape, history, and literary culture of Australia.

Connect to books about: Australian poetry, the lyric essay, contemporary women's poetry, place-based poetics.

The guardians

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