Welcome to my home on the Internet
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My first full-length collection of poetry The Honicknowle Book Of The Dead was published by Shearsman books in April 2009. Here on my home page you'll find snippets of what reviewers have been saying since The Honicknowle Book of the Dead made its long awaited debut last year.
The Honicknowle Book Of The Dead is where memory, movies, television and 1960's rock bands merge into a surreal narrative. It is where Lorna Doone and Louis Aragon share pages with Hank Marvin and Elvis Presley, and where - in an alternative universe - Ted Heath took Europe into the Common Market; Ted Heath, the band-leader, that is. For memory is confusing, and poetry is rarely anything but confusion.
Welcome to the extraordinary world of Kenny Knight.
“In Kenny Knight Plymouth has produced a poet rare for these times, one who loves the rain but always walks on the bright side. These poems are biographical nostalgia, filtered through a deadpan poetic charm back into a childlike original wonder that sees the world as prelapsarian and amusingly innocent.” - Tim Allen
“The Honicknowle Book Of The Dead may have been long in the making but it is a quick-witted invocation to transformational identity embedded in Dairy Lea and Dolcelatte. It is also much more than this. Here is the rarely explored mythology of England, precisely the Honicknowle suburb of Plymouth, peopled by the living and the dead, ambiguous Buddhists, Miss Paris playing Telstar to the dinner ladies and newly minted Mods.”
The Honicknowle Book of the Dead speaks without fuss and repeatedly we are left to admire its humanity and syntax:
'The donkey that bit my father on Weston-super-Mare beach after he'd foolishly stuck his hand in its mouth, was called Danny.' - Kelvin Corcoran
“Kenny has been working on this book for years and I have heard some of the poems at readings in Exeter and Plymouth, they are entertaining and unpretentious, zany and intelligent, definitely his own original and idiosyncratic voice. I recommend this collection as a necessary purchase. Kenny is an excellent poetry performer with a great sense of timing and very funny delivery, he ought to be more widely known.“
- Tony Lopez
On the reviews page you can read a healthy chunk from a review Steve Spence wrote for Tears In The Fence, in the not too distant past as well as an extract from a letter Harry Guest wrote in July 2009.
To read a selection of poems from The Honicknowle Book of the Dead, click onto Poems. There you will find a new poem called ‘The Vandike Club’, which is from an unpublished collection with the title ‘Trout Fishing On Treasure Island'.
To order a copy of The Honicknowle Book of the Dead, click onto the Shearsman website via the links page or order it from your local bookshop.