Poet moving in infernal circles

SARAH Holland-Batt is sometimes a stereotypical poet: dreamy and preoccupied when gestating her next verses, which is how she came to leave her mobile phone in the fridge's butter compartment.

SARAH Holland-Batt is sometimes a stereotypical poet: dreamy and preoccupied when gestating her next verses, which is how she came to leave her mobile phone in the fridge's butter compartment.

But there is a strong business-like streak there, too, a determination to make a career in an art form notorious for lack of money and opportunity.

These traits have proved a winning combination. Her first book, Aria (University of Queensland Press, 2008), was released to critical acclaim and is the recipient of multiple awards, but her targeting a Fulbright scholarship paid off, too: she will leave for New York University in August to begin a masters of fine arts in poetry.

"I worked very hard on that process," the Queensland University of Technology lecturer in creative writing and literary studies says of her Fulbright application. "With the arts you scramble to find scholarships you are eligible for, there are lots for the hard sciences."

Holland-Batt, 27, is two months into a six-month Australia Council literature residency in Rome but made a flying visit to Australia to attend the Fulbright award announcement in Melbourne last week and to read in Canberra as part of receiving the ACT Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

In Rome, she is writing poems and short stories and researching her next project, a reworking of the story of the adulterers Paolo and Francesca, from the fifth canto of Dante's epic poem The Inferno (the first part of The Divine Comedy).

"They are in the second circle of hell which is where the adulterers reside, reliving their good memories," she says. The circle is always in motion, an idea that for her echoes the immediacy of the lyric poem. "It is still speaking straight to us so, for example, with Keats or Dante, you can always enter their poems at any point in history, that's almost like the circular movement in the second circle."

She is researching the Paolo and Francesca story and the several operas written about it, of which the best known is Rachmaninoff's Francesca da Rimini.

What should emerge at the end of her New York sojourn is enough poetry for a new volume.

The work in Aria was from a longer time span. "Some of the poems were from five years or so before: I wrote more than 100 but I didn't feel all of them should go in the book. When I got to the end of the manuscript I was thinking, `What else can we take out?' "

This penchant for whittling means Aria contains a tight group of 42 poems. It won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Hewett Fellowship.