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Luke KennardThe Solex Brothers (Redux)And Other Prose Poems |
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Biographical note: Luke Kennard is a poet, critic, dramatist and pugilist. He is compassionate, but prone to anxiety and bleak introspection. Many have called him polite and quite funny, but add that he suffers from a tendency towards constant nervous laughter and an apparently involuntary rictus of disdain. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Stride Magazine, Sentence, Echo:Location, The Tall Lighthouse Review, Reactions 4, Orbis, 14 Magazine, The Flying Post, Exultations & Difficulties. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for Best Collection in the 2007 Forward Poetry Prizes. He is quite tall.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844714117
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Short
description/annotation: The Solex Brothers explores the fate of the individual – albeit a rather feeble individual – and of personal responsibility in a culture of absurd, inexorable forces. Farce navigating towards moral absolution in narratives at once Fauvist and Baroque, expunging the twee with a reformist's remorseless vigour; cherishing its influences with a poststructuralist’s vertical rigour; and, at times, chasing its tail with a schoolboy’s reductive snigger.
Main description: Like a toboggan of wolves who have eaten their driver, The Solex Brothers rushes blindly through the forest, drawing on the tropes and archetypes of folk tales, parables, political manifestos, philosophical tracts and grammar. Unlike a toboggan of wolves, The Solex Brothers explores the fate of the individual – albeit a rather feeble individual – and of personal responsibility in a culture of absurd, inexorable forces. Farce navigating towards moral absolution in narratives at once Fauvist and Baroque, expunging the twee with a reformist's remorseless vigour; cherishing its influences with a poststructuralist’s vertical rigour; and, at times, chasing its tail with a schoolboy’s reductive snigger. Like a toboggan of wolves who are beginning to regret having set-upon and eaten their driver, the world of "The Solex Brothers" is funny, sad and irretrievably lost
Table of contents:
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Excerpt from book: Scarecrow Every bird that flits across our path contains a pea-sized brain which the bird uses for navigation, muscle control, detection of predators and tweeting. On its way to my pocket a ten pence piece glinted in the moonlight. I checked the date (1992) and the tiny but unmissable chink one micron to the left of the Queen’s earring. This very coin had turned up in my change during most — if not all — moments of significance in my life to date. I went to sit by the river to reflect on what its arrival might portend on this occasion, but was immediately seized, bound hand and foot and carried into town. ‘Like scarecrows, do you?’ said the grubby-faced men. During my trial the judge’s contact microphone kept losing power. ‘Foul … Unnatural … Halcyon … Porous …’ he said. Next day they attached me to a post in the middle of an oceanic cornfield and left me for dead. A crow landed on my shoulder and whispered, ‘You do realise, old thing, that we’re not actually the least bit scared of you?’
Review quote: Kennard’s imaginative range is constantly awe-inspiring, coupling as it does seeming absurdities with healthy doses of down-to-earthiness to concoct, well, I don’t care to try to name what it concocts, because to name it would spoil my day. Reading “The Esplanade”, which concerns a spy and an assassin, sort of, it occurred to me somewhat belatedly that the voice behind these, um, things (the narrator? Well, maybe) is consistent. It belongs to a participant in what’s going on, someone who is a part of things but somehow adrift, at times very switched on and self-assured, at other times bemused and something of a spectator. Martin Stannard
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