Channels and backchannels: Trauma in Kate Lilley’s <i>Tilt</i> and Anders Villani’s <i>Totality</i>

Trauma theory has become central to analysing suffering in literature, and works that testify to trauma have grown more numerous and influential in contemporary Australian poetry. Yet the question of how poetry in particular represents trauma remains understudied. This article discusses the representation of trauma in two Australian poetry collections: Kate Lilley’s Tilt, and my own Totality. I analyse how Lilley’s collection oscillates between a lucid, narrative recounting of traumatic violence and a depersonalised, formally dense, allusive poetics. In this clash of strategies, trauma constitutes an ongoing negotiation, and the wounded subject wishing to heal relies on an absolute notion, the recovered self, which is both essential and impossible. Critically reflecting on the writing of Totality, I consider how trauma inheres as a catastrophic knowledge that the subject must and must not articulate, and how the dialectic of disclosure and concealment influenced my poetic practice at the formal and rhetorical levels.