The Roads

The Roads by David Kennedy

At the heart of David Kennedy's new collection is a sequence of elegies: for the poet's father, poets Jack Beeching, Ric Caddel and Kenneth Koch, the actor Anton Walbrook and the critic Nicholas Zurbrugg. These brilliantly crafted and deeply affecting poems seek out forms and language that are appropriate not only for their subjects but for the work of mourning and consolation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What results is an exploration of poetry as behaviour and habitation. These concerns dominate The Roads as Kennedy guides readers on exterior and interior journeys that take in lives clinging to the stony plateaux of the Auvergne and the paintings of Egon Schiele or probe the beginnings of language and the inhospitable distortions of officialese. The Roads rejects hierarchies of poetic propriety and sees a mature, confident artist exploring the full range of his concerns with exuberance and originality. The book also brings Kennedy's much-admired sequence on Joseph Cornell's boxes to a wider audience.

Kennedy offers an unblinking poetics free of specious closure.. The journey, as in Cavafy's `Ithika', is all. One arrives at the end of his poems ... entranced.

* Poetry Review *

He has an obvious lyric talent and the poems are often artfully under-written; they have an oddly shifted sense of perspective, perhaps with just a dash of that New York hot sauce ... Kennedy's I's ... are exteriorised, ironised, not the never-ending celebrations of self that one sees so often.

* Shearsman *

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 three collections with Salt; The Dice Cup, translations of Max Jacob's prose poems with Christopher Pilling; the collaboration Eight Excursions with Rupert Loydell; and monographs on Douglas Dunn, on elegy, and on ekphrasis in contemporary British poetry. David lives in Sheffield with his wife, the artist and poet Christine Kennedy.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781844711079
ISBN 10	1844711072
Title	The Roads
Author	David Kennedy
Series	Salt Modern Poets
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Salt Publishing
Year published	2004-12-10
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.