Kate Lilley has published three books of poetry, including Versary (2002), winner of the Grace Levin Prize, and the acclaimed Lady Like (2012). Her most recent collection Tilt won the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for poetry.
Lilley is a poet of exceptional formal skill whose poems engage with a profusion of ideas and subjects that are testament to a fierce intelligence. Over the course of three collections, her range of references and thematic concerns are dazzling, from 16th century England to 1970s Sydney, Viennese psychoanalysis, female sexuality and desire, the golden-era of Hollywood, childhood trauma and the conflicts and contradictions of the self (daughter, poet, lover, teacher, patient). Yet Lilley’s erudition is always tempered by the poem’s urge to connect. As John Tranter wrote of Lady Like, “it's the yearning, euphoric human peeping through the veil of art that seduces the reader.”
Lilley’s poetry also carries with it a savage wit. In “Pet”, Lilley playfully explores the complications and power dynamics in paired relationships, specifically that of teacher/student (turned lovers), while managing to get in the most brilliant and faintest of slant-rhymes (“bottle of gin” with “Olivia Newton John”), and one of my favorite closing couplets. Happy Holidays.
Pet
The new teacher takes me out:
orchestra, revolving restaurant, lesbian bar.
I burn my leg on the exhaust of her bike.
Next she comes around with a bottle of gin
and her admiration for Olivia Newton John.
Mortified, I let her do as she pleases.
When she moves in with me and my boyfriend, an alcoholic poet,
I develop a fever like Villette (which I haven’t read yet).
On the bus to school she cries about other girls,
Jobs she has had to leave in a hurry.
She shows me their bewildered letters, I disassociate.
When I stop having sex with her,
She calls me a bourgeois bitch and joins a gun club.
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