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LK Holt’s poems are stories, and eruptions from the midst of story. They are also pure lyric. A feeling for the formality of language guides her lines through a music of rhyme, half-rhyme (and quarter-rhyme) and turns found images of this world into blazon.
She explores some dark matters – paying homage to Goya, through the eyes of his mistress, and to Donne. She has a particular touch with the sensory strangeness in states of extremity; yet the giftedness of life breaks into vision in Holt’s poetry with lightness.
There is unblinking lack of amazement at violence; and a lively vein of the erotic. Both have a part in the carved meditations of two monologues at the book’s centre, ‘Unfinished Confession’ and ‘Long Sonnets of Leocadia’. Their scope of knowledge and understanding, with flourishing irony in the one and a just-smiling humanity in the other, seems effortlessly summoned.
‘Holt’s poems are marked by an innovative blend of erudition and profanity, tradition and radicalism, revisiting form . . . while embodying a refreshingly edgy and blasphemous feminism. [She] makes exceptional and disciplined use of imagery and rhyme . . . a collection perhaps thematically united by an insistent connection of the sublimity of death with the earth and art . . . rich and risky. Could it be time for young Australian women to shine? [Is Holt] among the bright young things of a Generation of ’08?’
From Maria Takolander, Australian Book Review, May 2008
Man Wolf Man is published by John Leonard Press
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