Monday, June 2, 2014

Kilter

Catching up on Anthony Lawrence's Signal Flare … the long opening poem, an elegy so clearly reminiscent of Slessor's Five Bells,  has these lines which nicely draw out the word 'kilter' from it usual environment, highlighting its strangeness

your absence the start
of a long playing record

of scenes and conversations
that are not out of place
or kilter with you death … 

In fact, the only other use of the word in a poem that comes to mind is by Peter Porter, and there it is ensconced as always with its known associates …. 

And in The Age of Epigram
When an out-of-kilter cummerbund
Or a wrong caesura in hexameters
Was most of what was worrying in art
Some brutal primitive was marketing
A colossal apparatus raising myth
To high symphonic shouting.