cover image: Niche, Julian Aubrey Smith, 2017
Shortlisted, the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry
Shortlisted, the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry
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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.
Ambitious in its thematic scope and highly original in its fusion of registers, LK Holt’s Birth Plan builds an expansive vehicle to explore the complexity of what it means to be alive in the world today. The poems are exhilarating in their complex and nimble rhythms, examining parenting, mortality, sexual politics, science, literary inheritance, illness, postcolonial dislocation and more, through a fearless and erudite feminist perspective. The voice that sustains throughout this collection is a wry one – sharp-edged and unflinching. Birth Plan bridges the complexity of history with the tension of the contemporary. It is rare to find a collection so skillfully layered, thought-provoking and affecting.
- Judges' Report, 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Award
Linguistically supple and engaged in experimentation with language, Holt's poems take the reader to locations as diverse as the Arapiles, Kangaroo Island and Barcelona. While apparently encompassing such experiences as childbirth, marriage, raising children and the death of a parent, Holt's collection explores too the curiosities of the natural world, juxtaposing human culture, in the form of music and art, with animals and birds. The poems connect the present with a long history of western artistic production. They place art and music in proximity with physical experiences, while also interrogating life with technology: the ubiquity of mobile electronic devices and Siri. Formally ranging from prose poems to sonnets that challenge readers' expectations about rhyme and rhythm, the poems in this volume contain arresting imagery. While titles are as diverse as 'She was Told to Have a Birth Plan' and 'I Don't Know', each poem, with its extended metaphors and precise yet original language, drives towards a new and more complete view of contemporary life, and its connections to the past.
- Judges' Report, 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award