Salt Modern Poets
2 total works
At the heart of David Kennedy’s new collection is a sequence of elegies: for the poet’s father, poets Jack Beeching, Ric Caddel and Kenneth Koch, the actor Anton Walbrook and the critic Nicholas Zurbrugg. These brilliantly crafted and deeply affecting poems seek out forms and language that are appropriate not only for their subjects but for the work of mourning and consolation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What results is an exploration of poetry as behaviour and habitation. These concerns dominate The Roads as Kennedy guides readers on exterior and interior journeys that take in lives clinging to the stony plateaux of the Auvergne and the paintings of Egon Schiele or probe the beginnings of language and the inhospitable distortions of officialese. The Roads rejects hierarchies of poetic propriety and sees a mature, confident artist exploring the full range of his concerns with exuberance and originality. The book also brings Kennedy’s much-admired sequence on Joseph Cornell’s boxes to a wider audience.
The President of Earth gathers the best and most exciting of David Kennedy’s poetry from the mid-1980s onwards. Ranging from graceful, evocative lyrics and mysterious dream-like narratives through alert cultural observations and hilariously inventive cut-ups, Kennedy’s work explores poetry as way of behaving in language that is also a way of behaving in the world.
The President of Earth is divided into three sections. `Histories’ gathers new and selected poems to represent the full range of Kennedy’s concerns: the city and the consumer, home and the world, England and Englishness, past dreams of the future, the modern experience of living inside accelerated change, and the consequences of the collapse of hierarchies of meaning. `Cities’ offers further explorations of that collapse and its consequences with a sequence of cut-up sonnets that revel in the energies generated by collisions between diction and content. The book culminates with a long extract from `Gardens’, an ambitious sequence-in-progress which uses a range of historical and contemporary voices to explore the garden as a repository of cultural meanings.
Reviewing the book in Poetry Review, Simon Jenner noted that the poetry is characterised by “an aleatory dream narrative, an associative richness” and concluded: “The openings draw one in but … the journey, as in Cavafy’s `Ithika’ is all. One arrives at the end of his poems … entranced.”