{"id":296,"date":"2014-03-05T23:19:09","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=296"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:30:31","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:30:31","slug":"patience-mutiny-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=296","title":{"rendered":"Patience Mutiny: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Sarah Day,\u00a0Island Magazine<\/a>, January 2012<\/p>\n

All but four of the poems in LK Holt\u2019s collection\u00a0Patience, Mutiny\u00a0<\/em>are sonnets, loosely speaking: they have fourteen lines and they are adroit in their lyric compression of large ideas into this compact form. In stanzaic structure they include the English sonnet form, but not the Italian. For the rest, the break-up of stanza and line length is treated liberally. The concluding couplet is a powerful tool in Holt\u2019s hands. Often, as in any good English sonnet, the nub,<\/p>\n

or epigrammatic turn, lies in the final lines. Listen to these:<\/p>\n

No matter how we persist,<\/p>\n

Love\u2019s a lever. We lower when we want to lift.<\/p>\n

(\u2018Progress Report\u2019)<\/p>\n

I think I shall pretend I\u2019m flying away,<\/p>\n

And by this sphere\u2019s doing reach you anyway.<\/p>\n

Aegis<\/p>\n

(\u2018Returning Flight\u2019)<\/p>\n

When you take up with whores<\/p>\n

you breathe in gladness<\/p>\n

breathe out remorse\u2019<\/p>\n

(\u2018Fragments of Alkaios\u2019)<\/em><\/p>\n

If you should ever need my life then come and take it.<\/p>\n

A knack for defeatist love is fathered in the boy.<\/p>\n

(\u2018Pavel\u2019s Table\u2019)<\/p>\n

Memorable phrases don\u2019t just come at the end of poems:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2026<\/em>Leftovers from the carnal Know:<\/p>\n

the all-wise illiteracy of smell\u2019<\/p>\n

(\u2018Portrait of a Family Man With a Portrait of His Father\u2019)<\/p>\n

Holt\u2019s poems are technically disciplined, sound working at all times in conjunction with meaning and image, and in the construction of the line. Regular metre comes and goes, operating as a sort of subterfuge in its inconstant constancy. The effect is to link the poems, whose subjects are wide-ranging, tonally and rhythmically.<\/p>\n

Holt draws on what\u2019s to hand for her content: day-to-day experience, Fox News, myth, classical allusion, the literary canon \u2013 Kafka, Chekhov, Lorca, Dorothy Wordsworth, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Edda of Old Norse, Alkaios of ancient Greece \u2013 Darwin and Mawson too are all present as illustrative references or poetic forms. This might sound like bricolage, but there\u2019s a deftness in Holt\u2019s style of building her literary bower. Her briefest allusions are entirely apt: \u2018All wild animus left in a corner of Bosch\u2019s\u00a0Heathrow\u2019 (\u2018<\/em>Departing Flight\u2019)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So much poetry steers clear of specific public concerns. The risks of didactic or edifying writing are well-known. I applaud Holt for taking up the challenge and carrying it off in a number of poems. \u2018Shipbreaking\u2019 is a powerful comment on the dispensability of human life. It moves dextrously from the particular to the universal in its conclusion. In \u2018Memo\u2019,\u00a0<\/em>Holt describes the exodus of discarded computers arriving \u2018in West Africa by the million-tonne\/, following the slave route back\u2019. Children sift through the toxicity of smashed monitors \u2018through the long line of elements:\/ cold-war americium; imperial europium\/ arsenic, boron, lead and cadmium,\/ Cleopatra\u2019s black antimony\u2019.<\/p>\n

The notes at the end of this collection seem somewhat arbitrary. Details about Lorca, for instance, are included but nothing about Edda or Alkaios, of which I\u2019d imagine less would be known.<\/p>\n

I have numerous favourites in this collection, which repays many readings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Sarah Day,\u00a0Island Magazine, January 2012 All but four of the poems in LK Holt\u2019s collection\u00a0Patience, Mutiny\u00a0are sonnets, loosely speaking: they have fourteen lines and they are adroit in their lyric compression of large ideas into this compact form. In stanzaic structure they include the English sonnet form, but not the Italian. For the rest, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}