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David KennedyThe Devil’s Bookshop |
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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
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Short
description/annotation: 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 and care about the wrong things. The relationship between care and neglect is a constant theme throughout the collection. Some poems respond to the London bombings of 7/7 and the ensuing climate of paranoia and scrutiny.
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.
Table of contents:
View excerpt as PDF:
Excerpt from book: Entry on Freedom
Unpublished endorsement : It is David Kennedy’s generous curiosity about things, people and events — present and absent, near and distant — which gives his poetry such variety of form and subject. Ever alert to the mess we're in he can turn words round to make sense again with sudden humour: the reader learns to expect only the unexpected. Alan Halsey
Unpublished endorsement : These poems are for thinking with as well as reading. They explore dreams and nightmares, philosophies and landscapes, the settled and the random, and are informed by a conscience simultaneously moral and lexical. They are discursive but can aim a sharp aphorism, fluid in form but structurally sound, sceptical and sensuous. At a time when the choice for poetry might appear to be between a confusion of multi-voices for the multi-verse and the too easily won solidity of the lyric I-for-an-eye, David Kennedy’s work is a welcome bridge. Walk across it slowly, savouring the gentle sounds of crafted timber and flowing water, the many changing perspectives. Carol Rumens
Unpublished endorsement : Versatility, humour and aplomb — these are the hallmarks of David Kennedy's poetry. The Devil's Bookshop has them all! John Hartley Williams
Review quote: Aids continues to test many aspects of society: medical care, of course, but much more broadly, civic responsibility and social relationships. The opening poem is an elegy to one of the first known casualties, Gaetan Dugas, who died in 1984 in his early thirties. Dugas was traduced as ‘Patient Zero’ which, as Kennedy says, maligned him as "a hole, a dirty sink, a poisoned outlet". Here his humanity is recovered in an image, paradoxically, of a commemorative tree planted against one council's express wishes. In dignified defiance it "survives… untended" and stands "exchanging earth and heavens". The delicate charge of this is characteristic of a book that meditates on a pleasingly varied range of modern-day subjects, from the London bombings to the composer John Cage. Richard Price
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