'Technically expert and purposefully experimental, Three Books continues Holt's long interrogation of the lyric form, and of the language, the roles, and the conventions we find and lose ourselves in. This substantial and significant new collection is formed from three volumes of poetry that stand independent, yet also reverberate as one. The first volume, 'Merry War (of never meeting and never ending)' comprises Holt's loose versions of the love poems of Jahan Malek Khatun (a female contemporary of Hafez) and the Roman poet Catullus. Their poems alternate, in parallel, upon the same atemporal plane of expression and desire-they never meet, but beside each other they become the receiver for the other's invocations. The second volume, 'Nina in the Hag Mask', consists of poems and suites within a tonal loop-modern structures for housing the primitive Uncanny, the fears and anxieties that are our birthright. The final volume, 'April', is a long prose poem, sounding out the ways in which a self possesses time and language, and vice versa. Long-term readers of LK Holt will see in Three Books the further evolution of one of Australia's most formidable and ambitious poets.' (Publication summary)
'L.K. Holt’s sixth collection of poetry, Three Books, opens with Merry War (of never meeting and never ending), Holt’s liberal translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun and of the first-century BCE Roman poet Catullus, presented contrapuntally on facing pages. The second book-within-a-book is Nina in the Hag Mask, an array of prose poems, sonnets, further translations and taut experimental lyrics. The third, April, is a single – and singular – long prose poem, tracing the meandering reflections of April and her friend June, interrupted by the “noisy data” of their experience and by Holt’s loose translations of excerpts from Anton Chekhov’s novella The Steppe.' (Introduction)
'L.K. Holt’s sixth collection of poetry, Three Books, opens with Merry War (of never meeting and never ending), Holt’s liberal translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun and of the first-century BCE Roman poet Catullus, presented contrapuntally on facing pages. The second book-within-a-book is Nina in the Hag Mask, an array of prose poems, sonnets, further translations and taut experimental lyrics. The third, April, is a single – and singular – long prose poem, tracing the meandering reflections of April and her friend June, interrupted by the “noisy data” of their experience and by Holt’s loose translations of excerpts from Anton Chekhov’s novella The Steppe.' (Introduction)
