'When I write I take things from everywhere / like a magpie and twist them.' The lyrical verve, wit and tenderness of Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend are signature qualities of Kenny Knight's poetry. He writes about lived experiences noticeably free of the self-important theorising in plentiful supply elsewhere in the House of Poesy. This does not indicate any sort of abandonment of artifice, that necessity in poetry like this is of a different kind. The artistry here is absorbed in the exchanges of human voices and graced with a magpie poetics, 'while the wind blows off the Atlantic/like one of Bob Dylan's songs.' This is also a world of the bright prospect at hand, of vivid childhood memory, rock'n'roll youth and intoxicating discoveries. It reaches out on 'three thousand miles of soggy paper/a poem that begins in Honicknowle/ and ends on Olson's doorstep in Massachusetts.' This requires that the sea-soaked paper holds out long enough to get us there. We might just make it, transported by 'that giraffe/driving a steam roller' pausing 'to let the shadow/of a crow and a swan/fly over the zebra crossing/outside the greengrocer's/at West Park.' Finally, Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend, is a poetry of a particular type of flaneur, aware of time passing and engaged in a dialogue with a multitude of personae, of the self and others. Here is the poet in Plymouth encountering Eric Dolphy, the undercover cop, Geoffrey Hill, Buddy Holly, the supermarket worker, Cy Twombly, Van Gogh, Ornette Coleman, Pink Floyd, Matisse and Don McClean.

Kenny Knight's second collection offers more explorations of his Plymouth childhood and the absurdities, as well as the joys, of his adult years. He is still amazed by the fact that Lobsang Rampa was a plumber from Plympton, by the roster of bands he saw at the fabled Van Dike Club, and by the vibrancy of the more recent local literary scene. The author's keen eye and gentle, deadpan sense of humour make these poems as memorable as those in The Honicknowle Book of the Dead.

Conoisseurs of the arcane will no doubt wonder what it is about Plymouth and Buddhism: first Lobsang Rampa, a.k.a. Cyril Henry Hoskins - erstwhile plumber's son and host to the transmigrated soul of a Tibetan lama - and now Kenny Knight's repeated invocations of the Dalai Lama - occasionally accompanied by Ruth Padel - in a new Book of the Dead. While Nirvana might be hard to reach in this suburban district of Plymouth, the highlight of which is a misplaced 19th century fort, it nonetheless reaches the status of myth in this collection of poems. The Honicknowle Book of the Dead is where memory, movies, television and 1960s' rock bands merge into a surreal narrative; it is where Lorna Doone and Geraldine Monk share pages, where the local poetry scene announces its presence, and where - in an alternate universe, perhaps - Ted Heath led Britain into the Common Market, Ted Heath, the band-leader, that is. For memory is confusion, and being young is confusing, and poetry is never anything but confusion. Welcome to extraordinary world of Kenny Knight.