Julia Copus

Julia Copus is often described as a musical poet, a characteristic she shares with her three brothers who are all professional musicians. Combining sentiment with science, her poems achieve a critical balance between intensity and hope without underestimating the irreversible impact that events can have on our future. Her subtle rewriting of fairytale is symptomatic of the fragility of childhood, and the choices that are made for us. This is emphasised through Copus’ invented poetic form, the specular, of which ‘The Back Seat of My Mother’s Car’ is a noted example, encapsulating the grief of a separation between father and child.

Copus explores the complexities of family in her first collection The Shuttered Eye which traces and marks absence in its many forms — in distance, unsettlement and in death. The poems here are arranged as a sequence of snapshots and memories, illustrating the consequences of ruptured relationships, and giving shape to the emotions that a camera lens cannot capture and the detail that may be deliberately excluded.

In her following collection, In Defence of Adultery, Copus continues her consideration of the past and the selection process by which we direct our lives. Having a deep interest in ‘shadow selves’ — or the alternative self born of a different decision — Copus presents us with a parallel narrative, the life that may have been. In this way, she encourages that we are all “vessels of the possible”.