Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend, Kenny Knight (Shearsman)
This is a stunning collection. These long poems stay with me, like nothing since I read, by accident years ago, the poems of Jaroslav Seifert, the Czech Nobel Laureate. They have a similar mixture of close intimacy and expansive mapping; at times they are tied to very specific places and yet they always exceed them, push at their edges, and at the edges of the people inside their lines; these are poems about travel and dreams of journeys never taken, of girlfriends never met, of the zone between parting and changing, loss and seeing anew. The poem ‘Blue Gone Grey’ ends with lines that seem to microcosm the whole collection:
I sit here in the quiet of my room
on the doorstep of the wild Atlantic
and read the love letters of Miss Havisham
to a sea monster playing jazz.
The poem is sited, placed, it’s about love, vaporisation and the promise of an escape by water, and then comes the visual stutter… the reader of ‘Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend’ is repeatedly thrown about by this ‘wild Atlantic’ of poetry. There is a melancholic tenderness throughout:
This old bruise of romance
is my heart
But the image never settles for long before it is disturbed by ‘something broken and nomadic / reassembled on the road’. Part of the wonder of the collection is that these are poems made on the move, all about leaving and letting go, saying goodbye and losing, and yet for all their unfixedness – ‘Sometime after that / I declared myself Switzerland’ – they always come back to details, the materials and the precise atmospheres and feelings of the real:
Out of mud comes beauty….
….the queenfisher….
She’s got a hairstyle made for
a punk rock night in Bretonside….
….and she’s gone
diving like a paintbrush.
Is there a better description anywhere of that bird; a bird that in the poem is bird and more?
The imagery is repeatedly startling: ‘like a ghost through butter’, ‘leaving in an old pair / of sleep-walking boots’, ‘a traveller hunched over a table / out on the Atlantic / watching cups slide / like disembodied ice skaters’, but that isn’t enough to represent these poems. They are each a crafted adventure, full of judders, accelerations, long yearning snapped up in a phrase, and they make the reader work while giving the reader everything they need. In the poem ‘Making Mary Shelley’ are two lines – ‘I made you out of bits and pieces… stuck paper all over your body’ – which almost sound as if one leads to the other, but only by the circuitous route the reader has to take themselves.
The poem ‘It was ducks not blackbirds’ deserves to be repeatedly anthologised and widely known. It is a classic. Rooted around Kenny Knight’s home patch of Honicknowle in Plymouth, it recounts the first day the young Knight arrived home with poetry in his head and blurted it out:
Without any preamble
I grabbed a broomstick
Making my debut
On the Plymouth Poetry scene
To an audience consisting
Of my mother and the family cat
And in the applause that didn’t follow
I climbed the stairs to the quiet
Of my room where I looked
Out the window across the Tamar Valley
And in my imagination
Sent an innocence of crows
flying north across the sky
To Woodland Wood.
Funny, ordinary, completely extraordinary, dreamy and down to earth; this book deserves a huge readership of people to enjoy its tender journey across the vast expanses of a very remarkable imagination.
Phil Smith