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Ladylike by Kate Lilley
JUDGES' COMMENTS
Intelligence and observation shine from Kate Lilley’s Ladylike. These trim poems linger in thresholds between the material world and otherworlds of slippage and under-sound. Lilley is an expert analyst of female identity and, in this scintillating collection, all kinds of women and girls — wayward, proclaimed, scandalous, diminished, wronged — are recovered and redeemed. She adroitly melds the seventeenth century with the nineteenth and the twentieth (with its cinema classics and Freudian psychosexual dreams and neuroses) and the televisual synthetics of the twenty-first.
Lilley’s poems are clever, sly and often very funny, especially in her erudite critique of Sigmund Freud's penis-envy theory. In the elegiac and emotional poems for her late mother, mother and daughter coalesce imperceptibly and mourning is immense, demonstrating the extraordinary reach of Lilley’s art. Lilley is an adept mistress of formal poetic considerations in her distinctly artful wordplay. Her poems are compelling and exquisite. This collection is a unique and noticeably bold intervention in the current field of Australian poetry.