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'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.
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