Man Wolf Man

L K 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 - with homages 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 unamazement 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. Man Wolf Man was awarded the 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.