Kate Lilley

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Biographical note:  Kate Lilley was born in 1960 and grew up in Perth and Sydney. After completing her PhD on Masculine Elegy at the University of London she spent four years as a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. Since 1990 she has taught feminist literary history and theory at the University of Sydney and has published widely on early modern women’s writing and contemporary poetry. She is the editor of “Margaret Cavendish”, “The Blazing World and other writings” (Penguin Classics).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857158
ISBN-10:  1876857153
ISBN-13:  9781876857158
Author:  Kate Lilley
Title:  Versary
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-02
Extent:  112pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.95
Price:  USD 13.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of contents:
Lady in the Dark
Nicky’s World
Souvenir
Block
Quality Control
Illocution
It follows
Where Was I
1972
Panic Stations
Sequel
Finally
Countrypolitan
Live at the Opry
Screen
Unsolved
Lady in the Dark
Formes Frustes
Crime of Passion
French Open
In the Sun
Hobohemia
say so
say when
Mint in Box: A Pantoum Set
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Mid-century Eclogues
Black Letter
Early/Modern
Circulating Library
Spruce
Affect Ensemble
Lady-in-waiting
Georgic
As Is
Tender
Starry Messenger
Post
Anamorphosis
Mock-Tudor
Tragicomedy
Prosopopoeia
Synecdoche
Historic
Preterition
Elegy
Envoy
Sapphics
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Crime of Passion

The frame can’t contain the enormity
of Lana Turner’s chiselled head,
all that agitated recollection
colliding with the bliss of technicolour
in a series of lurid flashbacks.
Don’t save your décolletage for a gala,
don’t wait up in a palatial home.
According to you, a pathological liar,
the letter of apology is in the mail
with an autographed studio portrait.
Just as every drunk has a manuscript,
unlimited emotions need chemical assistance
to achieve a plateau of friendliness.
Blushing can be a mark of respect
but in this case I was past caring.
Anyone can get trigger-happy
with the right cocktail of provocation.
The body lands at the foot of the stairs
and inspires a Continental sojourn
with time-lapse photography and painted scenes
better than a ticket to the opera.

Unpublished endorsement:  Kate Lilley’s wonderful Versary is a treasury of sentences, a cabinet of their variety and a practice of their power: from “Never let the sun go down” to “Can modernism get any later?”; from “We had a little fuss today/ over a bunch of gowns” to “The two halves of a face should stay together.” There is no resource of poetry that Versary doesn’t make a new use of, in a renewed attempt to wring from it all that can be wrung: “Everything means more than enough”, “The debt cannot be cancelled by any means.”

Mary Baine Campbell

Review quote:  What Kate Lilley gives us is the richness and vigour of the English Renaissance in the service of a complex set of postmodern concerns; scholarship as a handmaiden to art; and literature galvanised by passion. What we get is an alert, sharp-edged contemporary poetry, electric with allusion and irony, compulsively readable.

John Tranter
Jacket Magazine

Review quote:  Few things more exhilarating than ace work like Kate Lilley’s

Susan Wheeler
Poetryetc

Review quote:  Lilley’s intelligence, scrupulousness and humour are apparent in every line of this book.

Gig Ryan
The Age