Part of the romance of ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ is that, quite soon after its publication, its author, Kate Kilalea, abandoned poetry in favour of fiction. In the intervening time, the poem has come to appear like one of those brilliant one-offs – F.T. Prince’s ‘Epistle to a Patron’ or David Berman’s Actual Air – which the writer could not (or would not) reproduce. Its mystique is substantially bound up with how it concentrates two of its author’s key passions – architecture and music – inside a zone where its shadowy protagonists live, love, and especially, suffer. The reader navigates an underlit maze built according to some unknown emotional mathematics with the double-intuition that the right key might unlock the structure and that no such key exists.

‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ has impressed a wide range of poets, especially peers of Kilalea such as Emily Berry, Andrew McMillan and Sam Riviere, who have repeatedly praised and promoted it. It is the outstanding poem in Nathan Hamilton’s Dear World and Everyone in It (2012), an anthology which quirkily defined a ‘Millennial’ generation (I first encountered it there). As Charles Whalley observes, ‘[i]t haunts a whole set of contemporary writers’. In this essay I reappraise the poem while including some new angles of interpretation. While I am not claiming to solve ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ – it is not something to be solved – I think it contains elements and forces which, in previous accounts, have either been under-acknowledged or have passed unnoticed.

Kilalea’s first (and last?) poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh, was published in 2009. ‘Hennecker’s Ditch’ seems to ...