Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend
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A01=Kenny Knight
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Author_Kenny Knight
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British poetry
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
COP=United Kingdom
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_poetry
humour in poetry
Language_English
PA=In stock
poetry
Price_€10 to €20
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softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781848618145
- Weight: 163g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2022
- Publisher: Shearsman Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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'When I write I take things from everywhere / like a magpie and twist them.'
The lyrical verve, wit and tenderness of Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend are signature qualities of Kenny Knight's poetry. He writes about lived experiences noticeably free of the self-important theorising in plentiful supply elsewhere in the House of Poesy. This does not indicate any sort of abandonment of artifice, that necessity in poetry like this is of a different kind. The artistry here is absorbed in the exchanges of human voices and graced with a magpie poetics, 'while the wind blows off the Atlantic/like one of Bob Dylan's songs.'
This is also a world of the bright prospect at hand, of vivid childhood memory, rock'n'roll youth and intoxicating discoveries. It reaches out on 'three thousand miles of soggy paper/a poem that begins in Honicknowle/ and ends on Olson's doorstep in Massachusetts.' This requires that the sea-soaked paper holds out long enough to get us there. We might just make it, transported by 'that giraffe/driving a steam roller' pausing 'to let the shadow/of a crow and a swan/fly over the zebra crossing/outside the greengrocer's/at West Park.'
Finally, Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend, is a poetry of a particular type of flaneur, aware of time passing and engaged in a dialogue with a multitude of personae, of the self and others. Here is the poet in Plymouth encountering Eric Dolphy, the undercover cop, Geoffrey Hill, Buddy Holly, the supermarket worker, Cy Twombly, Van Gogh, Ornette Coleman, Pink Floyd, Matisse and Don McClean.
Kenny Knight has three full-length collections from Shearsman Books: The Honicknowle Book of the Dead (2009), A Long Weekend on the Sofa (2016), and Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend (2022). His work has appeared in Fire, Smith's Knoll, The Rialto, Tears in the Fence and Terrible Work, as well as in the anthology. In the Presence of Sharks - New Poetry from Plymouth (Phlebas Press), edited by Norman Jope and Ian Robinson. He works in a supermarket.
