'This volume opens with Keeps, a full-length book of new poems by LK Holt. Bound-in with it are her two prior books, Patience, Mutiny and Man Wolf Man.
'A hallmark of Holt's poetry has always been its continual refreshing of angles of vision. She has a dark skill with the unexpected image, and the thought that goes into an unexpected place. There is immediacy, even abruptness, amid her airy, crafted structures, and her music subsists in this.
'The keeps in the new book are of course the new poems themselves, which for Holt are essentially findings. Her impulse as a poet is to the retrieving of story, and the objects of the world that erupt from the midst of story. Her bent is at the same time lyrical, sometimes meeting the world afresh through contemplations of paintings, sculpture, and film, and always quietly touching on selfhood. The long, episodic suite, Stages of Balthazar, is about a donkey practitioner of instinctual acceptance. Followed and neglected by a Chorus as it can seem a self deserves Balthazar goes about his small village life, bearing a great love.
'By adding her prior two books to this volume, the Press intends not only to keep them in print, but to lay out for readers the fullness of the growth of an oeuvre. The poet has made some excisions and revisions.' (Publication summary)
'All but four of these poems by LK Holt are fourteen-liners: free-verse sonnets if you like—certainly lyrics, but somehow massive. They have elegance, terror, surprising imaginations, humour and extraordinarily disciplined thought. The darting variety that marked her prize-winning first collection has come to a steadier gaze in her second.
'A nut-shell account of the book’s four parts might describe a movement from familial well-being—happy-being—to a concluding psalmic sufferance, through reflections on the survival-feats of boys and men, on the self-presence of young women, and on love.
'That description catches her intimate touch but not her outreach. Holt’s writing shows how the present doesn’t escape the weight, or the light, of ancient narratives. History stands inside poems of contemporary dailiness, turning them to half-epic.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
