Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'Capacity is a volume with two chambers. The first, 'Modern Woman Sonnets', comprises twenty-six wild and precise love poems, which can be traced back to those of the Renaissance original Louise Labé. These sonnets are versions, hardly, or echoes, clearly, of Labé’s, and perpetuate the internal logic of her love. The book’s second part, 'Demonics', contains poems of a dark and numinous music, contemplating myriad forms of possession. The lyrical, transformative structures of Holt's poems provide ‘a field of force’ for the daimonic to play, within the self and without. The darting humour and lucid astonishments of her previous work can be found here in Capacity.' (Publication summary)
 

'Birth Plan is LK Holt’s fourth full-length collection is a generous, sharp-edged, technically masterful and expansive collection from one of Australia’s foremost female poets. These poems are transformative, fiercely feminist, unrelenting in their clarity, and display a rare mastery of the musicality of language. Exploring the realities of mothering and loving in the late Anthropocene, Holt’s work is rigorous in its exploration and evocation of psychological truths and half-truths. Fearless and darkly humorous, these are poems that turn on a phoneme and give full life and song to the shimmering uncertainties and hard realities of selfhood.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'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)