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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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Notes
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Dedication: For Ollie & Tad & Roo
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Where Do We Park?
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020;
— Review of Birth Plan 2019 selected work poetry ; Labour and Other Poems 2020 selected work poetry 'I remember sitting in a restaurant, out to dinner with a friend, before I had kids. At the next table a group of mature women were enjoying their meal and a few glasses of wine. They were telling their birth stories, screaming with laughter. The stories and the way they were told were a revelation. Birth was full of things, not just life, death and pain, but jokes, suspense, faces and hands, gas, water, pillows, floors, food, shoes, music, other people, words and sounds, joy, frustration, bitterness, fury and love.' -
Motherhood, Language and the Everyday During the Poetry of Astrid Lorange, Amy Brown and L K Holt
2020
single work
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , October no. 97 and 98 2020;'For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.' (Introduction)
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Birth Plan By L.K.Holt
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: StylusLit , September no. 8 2020;
— Review of Birth Plan 2019 selected work poetry'L.K. Holt’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, Birth Plan, is impressive. If the reader could somehow dive into a gold mine and swim through the layered seams of potential meaning, then that might come close to describing the rich experience of reading Holt’s poetry. This is challenging writing – most readers will require the Oxford English Dictionary on hand to look up some of the more obscure words used – and Holt makes no effort to cosset or cosy up to the reader. This is true both of her use of a precise and formidably vast vocabulary and of her direct approach to sometimes unsettling themes and content.' (Introduction)
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Two Surveys, Two Milestones : One Premature Death
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 79 no. 1 2020;
— Review of The Gang of One : Selected Poems of Robert Harris 2019 selected work poetry ; Birth Plan 2019 selected work poetry ; Empirical 2019 selected work poetry ; Crow College : New and Selected Poems 2019 selected work poetry'In 2017 Alan Wearne quite rightly decided that the work of Robert Harris deserved to be more widely available than through a scattering of individual volumes, and crowd-sourced funding for a selected—which may be an example of Australian poets taking a bad situation into their own hands, but which should never have been necessary if the rest of the country was even remotely aware of the achievements of its writers. Judith Beveridge came on board as editor, and the result is this very handsome and user-friendly edition.' (Introduction)
-
Two Surveys, Two Milestones : One Premature Death
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 79 no. 1 2020;
— Review of The Gang of One : Selected Poems of Robert Harris 2019 selected work poetry ; Birth Plan 2019 selected work poetry ; Empirical 2019 selected work poetry ; Crow College : New and Selected Poems 2019 selected work poetry'In 2017 Alan Wearne quite rightly decided that the work of Robert Harris deserved to be more widely available than through a scattering of individual volumes, and crowd-sourced funding for a selected—which may be an example of Australian poets taking a bad situation into their own hands, but which should never have been necessary if the rest of the country was even remotely aware of the achievements of its writers. Judith Beveridge came on board as editor, and the result is this very handsome and user-friendly edition.' (Introduction)
-
Birth Plan By L.K.Holt
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: StylusLit , September no. 8 2020;
— Review of Birth Plan 2019 selected work poetry'L.K. Holt’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, Birth Plan, is impressive. If the reader could somehow dive into a gold mine and swim through the layered seams of potential meaning, then that might come close to describing the rich experience of reading Holt’s poetry. This is challenging writing – most readers will require the Oxford English Dictionary on hand to look up some of the more obscure words used – and Holt makes no effort to cosset or cosy up to the reader. This is true both of her use of a precise and formidably vast vocabulary and of her direct approach to sometimes unsettling themes and content.' (Introduction)
-
Where Do We Park?
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020;
— Review of Birth Plan 2019 selected work poetry ; Labour and Other Poems 2020 selected work poetry 'I remember sitting in a restaurant, out to dinner with a friend, before I had kids. At the next table a group of mature women were enjoying their meal and a few glasses of wine. They were telling their birth stories, screaming with laughter. The stories and the way they were told were a revelation. Birth was full of things, not just life, death and pain, but jokes, suspense, faces and hands, gas, water, pillows, floors, food, shoes, music, other people, words and sounds, joy, frustration, bitterness, fury and love.' -
Motherhood, Language and the Everyday During the Poetry of Astrid Lorange, Amy Brown and L K Holt
2020
single work
essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , October no. 97 and 98 2020;'For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2020 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Fiction
- 2020 shortlisted Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Poetry
