LK Holt, Three Books
Winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry 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 with 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. If sentience is, as April, the heroine of the eponymously named poem, wonders, then perhaps we can see Three Books as the poet’s attempt to reckon with “the baffling result of simple action”. Holt transforms language into invocation, holding it by its stem.' Judges for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry 2024
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.
LK Holt has published six full-length collections of poems. Her book Birth Plan was shortlisted for the 2020 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry and the Grace Leven Prize for an Australian poetry collection, and has been longlisted for the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal. Her poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies in Australia, UK and USA. She lives in Narrm/Melbourne.
LK Holt, Three Books
2024. 148mm x 210mm. 144pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-65-9
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
