The Revelation of Truths: The Preoccupation with Life, Love and Loss in Kate Llewellyn's Poetry

2048 Words5 Pages

Kate Llewellyn is one of the most important contemporary Australian poets whose

poems deal with a variety of themes – life, love, loss and pain along with the

delineation of her emotions and experiences gathered while leading her everyday life.

Thus she has taken for her themes simple, everyday sentiments which are intense

enough, leaving deep impressions on her mind and in the process giving rise to these

emotions which she has recorded in her poems.

An attempt will be made in this paper to look into the different aspects of her poetry

and to analyse the ways in which she uses her rich experience to uncover truths

about life and its myriad shades.

Kate Llewellyn is one of the most important contemporary Australian poets whose

poems deal with a variety of themes- life, love, loss and pain along with the

delineation of her emotions and experiences. In recent years, she has emerged as

an influential voice in the field of Australian poetry. Born in 1940, she has been

writing and publishing poems for almost twenty six years , her poetry books numbering

seven in all till date. The first collection of her poems was titled Trader Kate and the

Elephants and was published in 1982. This collection was followed by other collections

as Luxury(1985), Honey(1988), Figs(1990), Crosshatched(1994) and Later Poems, the

last collection being written between 2000 to 2005.

Any study of all these poems in these collections would bring out a common

characteristic- their themes deal with the poet’s personal experiences gathered in the

course of living her life. The mood of these poems is a mixture of joy, sadness and

melancholy and they deal with the poet’s immediate felt experiences. Thus they have

inten...

... middle of paper ...

...of

her deep personal emotions and are therefore the expressions of truths realized in the

process of the journey through this world.

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop ed. Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake.

New York : The Modern Library, 1953. Print.

Gilbey, David. “Love’s Plunder: Desire, Performance and Craft in Kate

Llewellyn’s Poetry”. Poets and Perspectives-Kate Llewellyn.

U of Wollongong P, 2010, 92-103, Print.

Poets and Perspectives- Kate Llewellyn . U of Wollongong P, 2010, Print
.
[All quotations from the poems of Kate Llewellyn used in this article are

from this book]

Sheridan, Susan. “ Kate Llewellyn and Feminism”. Poets and Perspectives-

Kate Llewellyn. U of Wollongong P, 2010, 104-112, Print.

More about The Revelation of Truths: The Preoccupation with Life, Love and Loss in Kate Llewellyn's Poetry

Open Document