Duc Dau’s love of poetry started when she suddenly woke up from a doze in a year 12 class on Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” Her teacher was at that point reading the poem with immense passion, and upon waking up, Duc had a revelation that poetry was the most remarkable genre in the English language. She went on to complete a PhD at UWA on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which she subsequently published as a book, Touching God: Hopkins and Love (2012). She is a researcher at UWA and is currently completing a book on the nineteenth-century reception of the erotic biblical poem, the Song of Songs.
