144pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-65-9
Three Books
Winner, QLD Literary Awards 2024
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From the Judge’s comments, Judith Wright Calanthe Award 2024:
Three Books comprises "Merry War (of never meeting and never ending)", a suite of streetwise translations of 14th-century Persian poet Jahan Malek Khatun and Catullus; "Nina in the Hag Mask"; and "April", a singularly ambitious long prose poem. These are the work of a poet at the peak of her considerable technical abilities and imaginative range. Holt transforms language into invocation, holding it by its stem.
From ‘The Saturday Paper’:
‘Three Books is vast [in] scope and diverse [in] the ways in which it both seduces and challenges the reader. Over the past 15 years Holt has forged a singular path — erudite and formally sophisticated, her poetry has always been both intriguingly ludic and playfully serious.
Three Books shares the thematic preoccupations of earlier collections — how female bodily experience unsettles our assumptions of stable and contained identity, [and] the promise and frustrations of erotic and relational agency. What sets the book apart is that here Holt is diving even more deeply into her idiosyncratic formal inventions and collisions of register. The language is heightened and densely folded, with unpredictable bursts of profane vernacular … [w]hat remains is the incantatory and visceral power of words used as weapons against simplification and repression, and the tremendous, stark beauty.’
From the back cover:
Long-term readers of LK Holt will see in Three Books the further evolution of one of Australia’s most formidable and ambitious poets.
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.