Running alongside the Olympics, the Poetry Parnassus project is bringing together poetic representatives from every nation competing in the Games. Monday’s reading, chaired by Michael Schmidt, featured Katharine Kilalea, from South Africa, and New Zealand’s first Poet Laureate, Bill Manhire – representatives, also, of Carcanet’s global outlook.
Despite appearing alongside her in New Poetries V, this was the first time I’d heard Kate read her poems. Some poets have a 'reading voice', just as some teachers I remember had a particular tone for delivering moral lessons in assembly. Kate does not: her reciting voice is not markedly different from her speaking one, which is appropriate given that the language of her poetry is continuous with (though not identical to) the language of conversation – conversations between varied people, and about everything from business deals to bad dreams, as in 'Hennecker’s Ditch' which she read amongst other poems from One-Eyed Leigh. As is clear from her New Poetries selection, Kate likes to work beyond the limitations of the short lyric, and new poems she read to us from a sequence in the making promise a further development of her distinctive style.