Reviews
At last, the long-awaited arrival of Kenny Knight's epic journey into the depths of subterranean Plymouth, a glowing and nostalgic tribute to the hometown of a poet whose reputation may be on the brink of bigger things. This group of forty plus poems represents a serious advance from Knight' earlier work and it seems that having an overall theme - the area of Plymouth where he grew up, related tangentially to The Tibetan Book of the Dead - has fuelled a creative outpouring which might make a deeper splash in the wider poetic community.
Knight's exploration of post-war working class culture is both socially symptomatic and highly original. There is only one Kenny Knight, and his mixing of offbeat humour and endemic wordplay with innocent wonder and a melancholic nostalgia is a thing to behold.
Frequent references to Buckingham Shed - a sort of leitmotif in this collection - indicate a degree of republican sentiment, while also inducing much mirth and admiration in the reader, as Knight's trickily tottering narratives become even more bizarre and filled with puns.
Back in the days of the big band
you were either a member of The Royal Family,
a member of the nuclear family
The Buckingham Shed Collective
or Ted Heath and his orchestra.
Ted Heath and his orchestra always voted conservative.
When the big band era ended
Ted Heath became Prime Minister.
(Back In The Days Of Pounds Shillings and Pence)
This is a wonderful piece of invention but I wonder how many others growing up in the 1950's and 1960's made the same 'mistake?'. These poems are often fuelled by word association but the associations get ever more skewed and entertainingly mad without ev quite losing their critical focus.
Steve Spence
Tears In The Fence
It is the most affectionate collection - warm, deliciously funny, clear, evocative and intensely moving in the way you invoke the past so skillfully. It's a real very honest hymn of praise for Plymouth. You make your readers share what you have experienced against the background of local (and global) histories.
I love the surrealist touches, the perfect placing of the names of people and places, the wild placing of references next to each other - but above all the tenderness, it's a happy book to read.
Harry Guest