In Defence of Adultery
Published by Bloodaxe Books, 2003
The poems in Julia’s second collection are imbued with a wry logic and spellbinding resonance. They infuse us with primal stirrings as we read them, sharing in her unease and anxiety but also enlivened by a thrilling sense of personal recognition. They trace the paths of lives and relationships through a world carved out by the choices we make. At the same time, they summon up another world beneath our ever-pressing turmoil of love and family relationships, a parallel world made up of what might have been, as well as what might still be. These strong and vital poems hold science and art, time and timelessness in a tense balance. Dense, elliptical, and suggestive, they throw down a challenge to readers, urging us to be constantly on the move rather than stand still and stagnate.
Of late, it seems that a poet’s least reference to science is reason for automatic praise in the glorification of all things interdisciplinary, yet what makes scientific discourse apt here is the book’s pervasive engagement with problems of perception, causation, and narrative
A profound sense of human fragility… these are poems that reward the close listening on which they themselves depend
Copus has great leaping complex visions… But she’s nevertheless reliably attached to reality, to the oddness, the innocent simplicity of things, especially as they relate to humans. … Her poems are structured with immense quiet subtlety… She is particularly good on love, and how it operates
Poems that, for all their formal dexterity, fairly tremble with suppressed emotion… Copus is a poet of relationships, meditating in carefully crafted poems upon their trivial details and their grand designs with equal authority, and offering some important insights into how we make our ways through what Stephen Hawking calls “the dark stuff” of the universe
Our eventual winner, Julia Copus, had the “read-it-again” factor in spades. It was Simon Armitage who kept bringing us gently back to this poem. Every time, we found something new, something strange
[on the judging of the National Poetry Competition 2002]
Happily, Bloodaxe is still doing what it does best. Julia Copus’s In Defence of Adultery is the imprint’s most acclaimed title this year
Few poets can claim to have invented a form – but Julia Copus can… She is an intensely personal poet who also has the instinct, and the means, to project her poems… [Her] ‘metaphysical’ presence of mind, together with the human concerns of the poems, makes Copus’s a very impressive voice indeed
What makes Copus interesting is her robustness – her good ear and well-made lines, and her energetic pursuit of feeling when the mind is “curling / in on itself like the spine of a dog / as it circles a patch of ground to sleep”… These are substantial poems which expand with impressive ease and a willingness to risk dignity