These poems are a cornucopia of sage honey and wry asides. Words as sharp and close up and deadly as shivs slid into the underbelly of the reader, rearranging the way we see the worlds in which we live.
Holt is alert and aware of the dynamics of self-disclosure endemic in confessional writing, and offers humorous insight in the guise of a recipe or a procedural manual for navigating herself through the complex landscapes of history and culture. In ‘Directions For Use’, phrases such as ‘best suited for optimal discomfort’, ‘unweld the author’s mind’ and ‘please allow for one to two hundred years of self-infusion to seep into your pores’ play with the courteous language of urbane neutrality, while detonating dirty truth bombs, keeping the reader off kilter.
Author’s notes:
Position book where best suited
for optimal discomfort.
At any time, feel
free to unweld the author’s mind
with a traditional rust-free
can-opener.
Hold collection upside down for no
more than twenty-seconds at a time,
if words do not drop like clout nails
from accordion margin then straw
contents backwards commencing
from chapter three.
Between interval, please allow for
one to two hundred years of
self-infusion to seep into your
pores (resistance) is not optional.
Reduce, simmer and then return
author to the boil. Repeat
as necessary.
Additionally, once lukewarm
to taste, reader may wish to add
sage honey for anti-inflammatory
colonial, psychiatric sweetness.
Be sure to stir well (clockwise) of course.
When not in use, store in a cool,
dry place — preferably out of
direct sunlight.
Deposit poet into anything other than
a national museum or airtight
container.
Publisher’s note:
Once opened, you cannot unopen.
Holt infuses her work with imagery of landscape and human physicality, and languages drawn from many cultures in which her empathy makes her an insider. Her playfulness with truisms is a source of joy: ‘gavotting like a woman possessed’, the persona she creates exudes a multi-faceted sovereignty, and although the words explode in strands of colourful shots across the page, there is an elegant restraint which keeps them resonating within a conceptual framework.
Holt visually constructs the ideas on the page through shape poems and typographical placements, using deleted words, words in parentheses, words appearing in clusters along radiants aligned with each other, and lines and dots evoking indigenous artworks and song lines, to indicate the way the radar of her mind perceives the inter-relationships of events and occurrences and engages with the world. It’s a non-linear presentation, requiring the exercise of lateral thinking on the part of the reader, who is prompted to step into a kaleidoscopic world, where ideas and concepts rearrange.
She rephrases traditional truisms to spill more confrontational truths, using modes like the contract form and legal language to look aslant and askance at everyday interactions. Puns act like screwdrivers and bottle openers, to place and unleash meaning. She specializes in intervention, disruption, and provocation through judicious use of parody and paraphrase. She slices at an angle, using parody to puncture and create apertures for exploration: ‘From here to uncertainty’, ‘my love/ of that I am shore’, ‘They say home is where the rain is’, ‘For sale/one used womb /hysterically gendered/ inquire deep within’.
The shape poems are fascinating. Some are elliptical, some mimetic. The details in some are vivid and explanatory. The truncations in others are eloquent and evocative, asking us to fill in the gaps with the extensions of our imaginations.
‘Hands Free’, ‘Girl, Intercepted’ and ‘To Let’ strip down the flowing stream of lived experience to the most basic tenets. Freedom, consent, the way society positions us to deny and gloss over personal experiences of violation, choice and options, the challenge of invasion and the way we gather ourselves to respond, are all succinctly showcased, serration gleaming under the smooth surface. Rarely does a poet produce tactile as well as cerebral expression in such a natural and correlated way: ‘It is through poetry that I truly Braille’.
hands
f
r
e
e
“more fool you
for trusting only
my hands
it is through poetry
that i truly braille”
‘Girl, Intercepted’ alludes to the title of the memoir Girl, Interrupted, which tells the story of a young woman’s struggle with psychological challenges, but the menace and the tone created by the use of the police/military jargon of ‘interception’ evokes through stark juxtaposition the silent abyss and the covert operations which follows invasion of personal space. The layout of the poem, in short cutoff lines succeeding each other like gasps of breath, highlights the shock value of the words, which are oblique but crystal clear:
at age eleven
god declared
my body
an active
crime scene
This could be the incursion of menses, felt as an internal invasion, an outpouring into womanhood, or an experienced external assault, followed by the persona singing Christian songs at church the next day. Describing herself as ‘a caged canary’, the persona dissociates from what happened the previous day, suffusing the scene with a sense of suppressed violence and swallowed shock. The in medias res effect of non-capitalised lines and undemarcated sequences shows that these experiences are felt as continually recurring. God too, usually accorded a capital G, is simplified in this de-colonised utterance.
‘The Blackfella’ is a mini article, exploring the poet’s identity through a personal sociology which operates on multiple levels, using idiom, imagery, and cultural tropes to construct an entity which Holt embraces and celebrates as source material. In a colonial culture which has historically marginalised and denigrated her ancestors, she sees herself as ‘doubly blessed’.
The Blackfella
I am, I said it, I know it, I own it
I am the blackfella who was born into an expansive family of exceptional black love.
I am that blackfella who grew up the youngest of five children, raised at the kitchen dining table of superior black knowledge encompassing storytelling literature, sporting excellence, higher education, politics, justice, ancestral discourses of rivers, lands, skies and spiritual environments.
I am the blackfella who was raised listening to her parents, aunts and uncles at the altar of deep respect, manners, attention to detail and humility.
We, like so many families in our tight-knit, pruned carnations, manicured lawns’ south-western suburban community are that blackfella family who grew up in multiple worlds of neighbourhood camaraderie uprising in the pursuit of equitable educational and social community development for students and elders; I am that blackfella who benefited from parental hard yakka and home ownership borne from working-class grit built into the sandstones of intergenerational fingernails. For such families it was never just another day in the colony, Inala East 4077 was the colony, the colony of neighbouring champions who rolled sleeves up and gave it an almighty fair go. My parents and neighbouring families were not flash nor flushed with bungoo, to the contrary, they scrimped and scraped their way through those earlier years to provide for their children what they never had.
Today, Inala is a thriving multi-lingual melting-pot of who’s who blackfellas, whitefellas and faces from lands I had only ever read about from cover to cover every other weekend at the local council library corner (of Rosemary and Abelia streets) throughout the Hawkeism, Thatcherism, Reaganism ’80s. That was the Inala I grew up in.
4077 continues to grow as a large sprawling inter-generational, internationally celebrated multicultural suburb with enormous vibrant public festivals held throughout the year highlighting Australian history and diverse cultural community gatherings while maintaining with gusto its proud strengthening indigenous roots.
Am I not doubly blessed to have been born and raised by two immeasurable parents whose bloodlines are now my grandchildren’s collective story lines. Am I not doubly blessed that our shared herstory\history without deviation or pause pulsates beneath the consciousness of a salient cultural growth from one generation to the next.
Moving in silence throughout south-east, western, central and far north Queensland; my parents’ ancestral lands speak directly to me through night skies, totemic marsupials and otherworldly birds whose feathers and skins continue to roam the wishbones of these lands — just as they did once upon a dusk.
Quietly footsteps walk beside me, they protect me, they guide me, shhh — in clevering way, blackfella old ways, spirit walk with me.
The plethora of exuberant adjectives, the long vowel sounds, the assertion of ‘I am’, evoke the opening of the Book of Genesis, the planting of a flag in personal ground, and the proclamation of sovereignty.
Holt, with her complex bloodlines and ethnic/cultural/linguistic heritages is particularly well placed to comment on the search for identity, the longing for home, a sense of belonging, and the creation of individual wholeness from parts and pieces: ‘gasping beneath unedited first nations air quotes bubbling just beneath someone else’s tribal surface’.
In ‘Bread Sticks and Ancient Stones’, Holt disassembles some ugly oppositional thinking, using juxtaposed boxes and cloud pictures, drop box prompts with caption quotes and scribble bark lines and dots, playing off the binary oppositions of callouts and cancellations, of inclusion and exclusion, in the contemporary literary world in Australia.
The poem presents thought clouds and the notation of direct quotes form a visual scrap book of insults and stereotypes levelled at her, as people blunderingly try to categorize her and demarcate her into containers and corrals. Holt, with her variety of contextual allusions, modes and textures, with her intelligence and her emotional depth, eludes such crude confinements.
In ‘Lit Clique’ she comments on the contemporary obsession with signposting ourselves. The skewering of bougie food fashions infuses humour into the scene, while Holt’s references to ‘tooth wrestling parsley on a vegan artisan multigrain sanger’ and ‘pulp free recycled napkin’ shrewdly contextualise the performative call to personal trooping of colours at a ‘high altitude writers’ festival’.
Beware the thought police
are at large — said one
author to the other,
where, I care said the publisher
to the poet — at the bar,
in the tearoom, bathroom,
behind the desk, behind the
microphone, watering the plastic
palm trees in the foyer, where?
They’re in plain clothes,
they are everywhere whispered
the bookseller to the illustrator.
Cornered at the vegetarian
countertop,
I am asked curiously, politely,
yet not so surprisingly —
Yvette Henry Holt, what say
your pronouns…?
Confessing my grammatical
sins in the green room while
tooth wrestling parsley on a
vegan artisan multigrain sanger
at a high-altitude writers’ festival
was never a thing until it became
a thing.
Nonetheless, I have been asked a
rather direct question, thereby I will
attempt to answer
with a rather direct response.
[mental cap locks are on]
I announce my pronouns
me
myself
and I
swallowing the sabbath air without
soda water, you could have heard a
pulp free recycled napkin fall,
I continue…
My pronouns are all lowercase
except for the I as it is a
stand-alone pronoun,
some say this is what makes the
letter majuscule ‘I’ so unique to the
English language.
Go finger I conclude…but what I
really meant to say was go figure!
[insert double chin stroke here]
Atop the Azure Mountains,
some miniscule moments following
I thought I heard a misgendered volcanic
bobby ie -pin sigh,
but then again, I must have mis-herd.
Suddenly the green room blushed
a whiter shade of spring.
The October 2023 writers’ festival,
sure, it was wild but not that wild…
It wasn’t like Oscar Wilde or anything,
more like Jiminy Cricket wild
“Always let your conscience be your guide.” JC
In ‘Sabbatical 2025’, she labels herself, trying on multiple descriptors for size, jotting down abbreviated notes which evoke a bio profile:
Sabbatical 2025
My mid-life creative gap-year
A daughter, mother, grandmother.
protective, loving, cooking, reading, basketball, playgrounds, long walks, fitness, time togetherness
A true and loyal friend.
travel, coffees, bookstores, long phone calls, guidance, volunteering, thermal hot springs, short walks
A walk with multifaith.
daily prayers, scriptures, awareness, forgiveness, reading, faith, handwriting, typewriting, very long walks
In spirit
I am global. I am tribal.
I am. Love
She is well travelled, and feels at home in many realms. She says herself: ‘I exist inside worlds where few are ever permitted to visit / Eviction is not an option’.
I would follow this woman anywhere, not to have what she’s having, but to see what she is seeing.
Fitzroy North 3068 by Yvette Henry Holt is available from Upswell Publishing.
Devika Brendon is an academic, teacher, reviewer and editor of English Literature, as well as a creative writer of poetry and prose. She was consultant editor for FemAsia Magazine, and a poetry editor with Girls On Key, and is currently content editor for the New Ceylon Writing Literary Journal, executive editor of Glitterati Quill Magazine, and reviews editor at Verity La Journal. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and journals, both in print and online.
Devika is also a journalist, whose opinion pieces and articles have been published in The Sunday Times, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews, Ceylon Today, The Morning, and The Sun. Her first novel, Aversion, set in contemporary Sri Lanka, has recently been published by Jam Fruit Tree Publications. She is currently working on the sequel, Oh, My Darling.