John Leonard Press produces beautiful books of poetry. Proof of the editor’s precise standards, L.K. Holt’s Man Wolf Man features a fine, bullet-sized insignia of a wolf man’s head after the title page. But as Leonard has shown in publishing three (out of four) first books by young Australian women poets, he is not bound to tradition. Holt’s book, with its combination of formal style and feminist obscenity, and Elizabeth Campbell’s Letters to the Tremulous Hand, which includes poems about medieval scribes and human trafficking, suggest that Leonard’s aesthetic is more radical than most. Could it be time for young Australian women poets to shine? Are these two poets among the bright young things of a Generation of ’08?

Holt’s poems are marked by an innovative blend of erudition and profanity, tradition and radicalism, revisiting form (sonnet, triolet, sestina and villanelle) while embodying a refreshingly edgy and blasphemous feminism. The poems often anatomise masculine violence in striking, even literal ways. In ‘Slaughter house’, the poet focuses on the ‘little corpse’ of a worker’s finger, ‘uncanny without context, curled in introspection’, among ‘the solemnity / of a standing funeral crowd – beasts made vertical / like humans only upside-down, throat wounds smiling’. The poem, which portrays the abattoir as a ‘place where death is five-sensed and only later / methodology’, is cleverly (if a little clunkily) book-ended by a Dickinsonian meditation on death’s formality.