David Kennedy

Biographical note:  David Kennedy was born in Leicester in 1959. He co-edited The New Poetry and is the author of New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994. He edited the magazine of innovative poetry and poetics The Paper from 2000 to 2004 and publishes widely on contemporary British and Irish poetry. His publications include The President of Earth: New and Selected Poems; The Dice Cup, translations of Max Jacob’s prose poems with Christopher Pilling; and the collaboration Eight Excursions with Rupert Loydell. Monographs on Douglas Dunn and on elegy are forthcoming, respectively, in the Northcote House series Writers and Their Work and in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom. David lives in Sheffield with his wife Christine.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713172
ISBN-10:  1844713172
ISBN-13:  9781844713172
Author:  David Kennedy
Title:  The Devil’s Bookshop
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jul-07
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  What does the Devil like to read? In the title poem of David Kennedy’s new collection he delights in books that describe the ease with which people lose things, care about the wrong things, believe that caring about some things is unnecessary or that neglecting others is the right thing to do.

The relationship between care and neglect and how we choose or choose not to apply them is a constant theme in The Devil’s Bookshop. It is a relationship that is at the heart of moving elegies that rehabilitate Gaetan Dugas, the man erroneously held responsible for spreading AIDS through America in the 1980s, and pay tribute to psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who fought against prevailing medical opinion to give terminal patients a voice in their own care.

Care and neglect are also explored in a sequence about life in a marginalized village community; in poems that respond to the London bombings of 7/7 and the ensuing climate of paranoia and scrutiny; and in more meditative observations of light and old stones. The cumulative effect is a quiet but persuasive argument that it is by our acts of attention that we must be judged.

The Devil’s Bookshop closes with a sequence in homage to John Cage whose work in words, music and performance exemplifies the challenges and rewards of paying attention to attention itself.

Table of contents:
NEW GRAVES
The Metamorphosis of Gaëtan Dugas
The Bombs, July 2005
Calendar
The Lost Room
Winter Windows
Near Death
The Waters
Three Postscripts
THE VILLAGE
Prospectus
Rue Longue Kitchen Song
Expressions of Eglise Saint Laurent
La Spagna
Rough Guide
Song: The Night of August 12th
Snake Folio: Two Scenes for Seven Speakers
Unstoppable Languages
The Sounds
La Charraira Longea
From Brassac-les-Mines to Le Vieil Auzon
THE DEVIL’S BOOKSHOP
Entry on Freedom
The Devil’s Bookshop
Entry on Nation
Mr. Fox
Entry on Bottles
A Poem That Means What You Want It To Mean
Encore, Mr. Fox
Entry on Noise
Entry on Reading
Steinian Motions on a Theme by Montale
FOR CAGE: CHANGES / PAGES
Epigraph
Prelude
How to Begin
The Value of a Well
Etceteroar
Metallic Retiles / Fetlock Rebalance
Radical Rest
On Missing a Celebratory Lunch through Food Poisoning
The Sound of Sincerity
Something To Look At
Off the coast of the poem
Paint, Sauce, Self
We Speak
Christmas Day Music
Some Error in the Text
Thoughts Never Had
Shadow Haunted Movement
Elegy
A Note on the Text

Excerpt from book:  

Entry on Freedom

watching the air die
round marrows melons
acid loss already biting
the back of the trochee
anapest amphibrach
iamb’s throat damn
tree fizz
a subject for a poem
christine suggests knights templar
cleaning the cooker
or vegetables
she wears her laughter like a torch
the flies have it sussed
start out with a big idea
go straight for the sugar
laptop plays lute hits
from fifteen hundred something
wonder if anyone played air lute
behind us waterloo’s garden of swords
armed men and women hiding their faces
as if looks could kill
aftershocks of four men
everyone asks after even here
when did freedom get so weak
it can be blown inside out
maybe we never had it
that’s why loss is so big
you can’t go free again
well ‘let us remember nothing
but the days to come’
before back to being the filling
in a security / celebrity sandwich
spectacular poison
ah ah the noise that shakes the head
that says wait stop don’t

England-France-England, August 2005