Keeps gathers three stages of L.K. Holt’s poetry into one volume: the new collection Keeps, followed by revised versions of her earlier books Patience, Mutiny and Man Wolf Man.

Read together, they reveal a poet continually reworking the relation between perception and language—how an object, artwork, body or remembered scene can suddenly tilt and disclose another order of meaning.  Holt’s poems are dense without becoming sealed. Their strange syntax and abrupt images make reading an active form of looking: paintings, sculpture, cinema, myth and natural history enter the poems not as decorative references but as instruments for thinking about love, violence, mortality and selfhood. Beauty rarely arrives cleanly here. It is disturbed by menace, comedy, bodily fact and the sense that any stable image may contain another creature waiting to break through it.

The title suggests preservation, but Holt keeps her things by changing their angle, cutting into them and allowing their contradictions to remain alive. The collection is especially strong for readers drawn to formally alert Australian poetry, ekphrasis, difficult lyric and writing in which intellectual pressure never quite suppresses animal strangeness. Holt’s earlier collections received the Kenneth Slessor Prize and shared the Grace Leven Prize, while Keeps was longlisted for the 2015 ALS Gold Medal.

First edition, John Leonard Press, 2014. Paperback with light cover rubbing and minor edge wear; clean internally.