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Passage

96 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published September 2017
ISBN 9781925336436

Passage

Kate Middleton

Middleton reintroduces the reader to the world, to the strange and familiar, in ways that stay on, dwelling in the imagination with a sense of something akin to obsessive reverence. Jo Langdon, Mascara Literary Review

Kate Middleton’s third poetry collection continues her preoccupation with terrestrial and other landscapes, both real and imagined. The poems haunt, and are haunted by, the legacies of literature and history: whether inhabiting the scientific laboratory, the exploratory voyage, the layered history of landscape, or the voices of past authors, they are interested in the border-zones of understanding, in both the ‘the riddle of untrodden land’ and the buried history of lost empires. Formally, the poems move between traditional lyric and collage-style forms of quotation and erasure. Others take a speculative turn away from the book’s historical grounding, such as in the sequence of poems titled ‘Watching Science Fiction’ that are scattered throughout the book. Passage traces an imaginative path through orientation and disorientation, where a god in the form of a lion and rabbits with eyes ‘fantastically in bloom’ surprise and enchant at every turn. It observes the world under a watchful gaze, ‘Patient as an avalanche.’

About the Author

Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton’s collections with Giramondo are Fire Season, which won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009; Ephemeral Waters, which was shortlisted for the 2014 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry; Passage, published in 2017; and most recently Television, published in 2024.

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