Anthony Lawrence was born in 1957 in Tamworth, in rural New South Wales. He has worked as a stockman, fisherman, truck driver and teacher of English and Drama. He has lived in Western Australia as well as NSW, and now lives in Hobart in Tasmania.

Lawrence has published five individual collections of poetry, Dreaming in Stone (1989), Three Days out of Tidal Town (1991), The Darkwood Aquarium (1993) shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award, Cold Wires of Rain (1995), and The Viewfinder (1996) which won the 1997 NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry.

Lawrence’s significance as a poet was recognised in the 1998 publication, by University of Queensland Press, of his New and Selected Poems 1989-1998, a shorter version of which, together with new poems, was published as Skinned by Light: Poems 1989-2002 in 2002. A new collection, The Sleep of a Learning Man is to be published by Giramondo in 2003. Lawrence has also published a novel, In the Half Light (Picador, 2000).

Lawrence characteristically sets his figures within powerful landscapes and seascapes, so that there is a close transaction between the forces moving without, and those within the consciousness of his characters. Sometimes this takes the form of an elemental exchange or confrontation; at other times, it is enacted through ritual and the identification of significant detail. As a result, there is a strong dramatic quality in Lawrence’s verse, and one which enhances rather than diminishes the humanity of his figures, despite the scale of the landscapes in which they are placed.

His great emphasis, in this context, is on the primacy of relationship, particularly those most intimate relationships, between parent and child, or between husband and wife. This in turns leads to a moral questioning – about responsibility and duty, love and desire, memory and guilt – which, given the primal nature of the settings, takes on a primal quality itself. Though he is dealing with elemental entities and surreal intensities, Lawrence’s poetry is marked by both this moral concern, and by a sureness of touch which keeps the powerful energies he evokes under firm control.