'Tilt follows the skewed itinerary of attachment and loss, possession and dispossession; the movement of people and things, from Greta Garbo’s Manhattan exile to the Green Bans of 1970s Sydney to the precarious passages of deracinated subjects. In its detours through the copia of material history, lived experience and the archive of poetic forms, the book itself becomes a teeming repository of the real.' (Publication summary)
Author's note:
For Melissa
To enter into a pact
good for a lifetime
the joy of reunion unchanging.
'‘Even if truth be drawn from the work,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘the work overruns it, takes it back into itself to bury and hide it.’ This strange, poetic movement to conceal what is manifest brings to mind another statement, by the psychiatrist and author Judith Herman: ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.’' (Introduction)
'It seemed unusual to Dorothy Hewett that a man of substance might knock back the offer of sex with her underage daughters. After all, at the federally subsidised bohemian Woollahra pad she shared with her fellow writer and husband Merv Lilley in the 1970s, there had been lots of takers.' (Introduction)
'The title of Kate Lilley’s poetry collection is a poem all by itself. On the title page ‘TILT’ appears beneath the author’s name, making a visual rhyme with the ‘T’ from ‘Kate’, the ‘IL’ from ‘Lilley’. TILT is a not-quite-palindrome, only the horizontal on the ‘L’ throws out the symmetry. Being a little off balance is useful when reading these poems, as Lilley tips things askew to shake out what’s been camouflaged. As we read we’ll learn that Tilt was the name of a movie about pinball that starred a thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields. In pinball, it’s okay to nudge the machine to try and stay in control of the game, but to tilt the table is considered cheating. I’m not keen to make a reading of the word ‘tilt’ that references Don Quixote, despite Brian Bird’s 1948 photograph of ‘Luna Park lighted windmill’ that appears on the cover of the book. The giants Lilley rides at in these poems are not imaginary.' (Introduction)
'It seemed unusual to Dorothy Hewett that a man of substance might knock back the offer of sex with her underage daughters. After all, at the federally subsidised bohemian Woollahra pad she shared with her fellow writer and husband Merv Lilley in the 1970s, there had been lots of takers.' (Introduction)
'‘Even if truth be drawn from the work,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘the work overruns it, takes it back into itself to bury and hide it.’ This strange, poetic movement to conceal what is manifest brings to mind another statement, by the psychiatrist and author Judith Herman: ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.’' (Introduction)
'The title of Kate Lilley’s poetry collection is a poem all by itself. On the title page ‘TILT’ appears beneath the author’s name, making a visual rhyme with the ‘T’ from ‘Kate’, the ‘IL’ from ‘Lilley’. TILT is a not-quite-palindrome, only the horizontal on the ‘L’ throws out the symmetry. Being a little off balance is useful when reading these poems, as Lilley tips things askew to shake out what’s been camouflaged. As we read we’ll learn that Tilt was the name of a movie about pinball that starred a thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields. In pinball, it’s okay to nudge the machine to try and stay in control of the game, but to tilt the table is considered cheating. I’m not keen to make a reading of the word ‘tilt’ that references Don Quixote, despite Brian Bird’s 1948 photograph of ‘Luna Park lighted windmill’ that appears on the cover of the book. The giants Lilley rides at in these poems are not imaginary.' (Introduction)
