Three Books

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.