Sarah Holland-Batt

So I loved the challenge of this kind of incredibly poetic but really incomprehensible text at a first read.

And I sort of recognised something in it that was musical, that was kind of incredibly powerful.

And so, yeah, it was probably really T.S.

Eliot was the first poet who absolutely set my mind on fire and I was so lucky to have that dense, long reading experience with that one poem.

And I suppose it showed me the depth of where a poem can go to.

I mean, it's famously complex, but also so moving in parts.

And I was just very, very lucky to have that.

And then I moved on to, I really started all of my poetry reading were Americans because I was in an American high school.

So we weren't studying, you know, Gwen Harwood and Bruce Dorr and Les Murray or anything like that.

We were doing Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, all the kind of American classic poets that

And they just set my mind on fire.

I loved it.

And so for me, it happened in high school.

Yeah, so there was in, I think it must have been my junior year of high school, grade 11, I won some sort of poetry prize, some Colorado poetry prize for high schoolers.

And the prize for this was the princely sum at that time of $100 worth of a book voucher at this fantastic bookstore in Boulder in Colorado, which is, you know, famously kind of hippie town.

Allen Ginsberg had his weird kind of university there.

So Boulder is a place that's sort of steeped in literary kind of history, and there's this great, great grand old dame of a bookstore there.

And so I drove up to Boulder.

and was browsing and picked out all of these kinds of books in the bookshop, you know, poets that I already knew.

I had Pablo Neruda's love sonnets.