"Planet-Shaped Horse" by Luke Kennard (Nine Arches Press, 2011)

The narrator is a voluntary patient in a halfway house. Miranda is a pretty young mother. Girlfriend? Simon is his case-worker? There's an activist. There's golf. And there's a hermit/hermitologist. How much is merely in the mind of the narrator? The narrator thinks he's a writer - there are allusions to line-breaks, "first thought best thought", e.e. cummings, etc.

Miranda turns towards him "like a security camera". Simon's cat is called "Security Camera". Reality and representation are confused - an art project called I Faked My Own Life is mentioned, along with copyright infringements. In "Eyes", parts of his body are mapped to the hermitage, the golf course, etc.

There are many quotable fragments. Here are a few.

• I don't want to sound like a prophet,/ but last night I found over twenty things in Revelation/ that could be metaphors for the internet
• I bite into a tomato and when I look at it/ it looks exactly like the mouth which bit it
• In golf even having a drink with people you don't really like/ once the golf is over has a name, it is called the 19th Hole./ And why stop there? Your drive home could be the 20th hole. ...
• Miranda stands on the jetty knocking tennis balls into Lake sensible./ She is wearing an Edwardian swimming costume, off-set with a jewel-encrusted moth brooch,/ engraved with: 'THIS IS WAY TOO MUCH DETAIL FOR PROSE, EVEN'
• I make a cup of tea for each of the 68 cups in the house ... I arrange the cups of tea all over the ground floor
• [the hermit's] rumoured to live on the largest gold course/ in the country, one that cartographers leave off maps// so that it doesn't get too many members; in fact, all of its members are cartographers
• 'Not one of [the thoughts] matters,' he says. 'They're just the goopy// blue stuff in the spirit level. The bubble is what matters.' .... 'I suppose to you the owls sound like they're saying,/ "Ted Huuuuuuuuuughes! Ted Huuuuuuuuuughes! Well they're not"'
• In its glass the toothbrush leans forward/ as if condescending to admire a child's painting./ It is like the face of an old man whose eyebrows/ and moustache have grown to cover his whole face.
• 'The homeopathic cure for insomnia is a one-man-band', she says. 'And vice-versa.'

It's in titled sections, each made of regular stanza. Can any of the sections stand alone? They all have some weak lines, it seems to me. In any case, they're better read as episodic parts of a narrative. Fin has no stanza breaks. I'd say it's prose, in a Lydia Davis way.

Other reviews

• Charles Whalley (the comic, the writer & the madman are united by their refusal or inability to observe distinctions over different realities, or to privilege one reality over another ... his poetry, with its absurd observations & one-liners, owes a debt to stand-up comedy. ... Writers have a tendency to write often about writing, & there is a danger of it becoming tiresome quite quickly. Luke Kennard manages to explore this in an entirely new direction, without submitting to anything without involving multiple dimensions. It is a masterful collection, & a dazzling & slightly exhausting display of what can be done with two dozen prose-poems. As can be seen by the length & passing incoherence of this review, Planet-Shaped Horse is the single most exciting piece of contemporary poetry I have read in months.)
• Alex Campbell (The fact that this collection is a poem-play cannot be forgotten. There is a strong narrative thread running through the collection, which gives it a depth of meaning and character that no single poem could have achieved on its own ... Kennard’s work is clever, fascinating and with an off the wall, tongue in cheek sort of humour that is a joy to read or listen to. Perhaps though, we should take one final warning, from this collection; that “Like most jokes, the joke is on the people who pretend to get it” (Sobranies))
• D A Prince, George Simmers and Robin Vaughan-Williams (I heard Kennard read from it and decided it definitely wasn’t for me. However, when it arrived for review, I gritted my teeth—and had my mind changed. Highly intelligent humour like this is rare; there will be imitations, and they won’t come anywhere near this. ... The author-patient of Planet-Shaped Horse is more like the kitten who does understand about mirrors but persists in fighting its own reflection all the same, generating energy and humour in the process.)

"The Harbour Beyond the Movie" by Luke Kennard (Salt, 2007)

I've been meaning to catch up with this poet for years, this book in particular. Sometimes there are prose poems, with Russell Edson as a model, the twist being that there are line-breaks. There's use of familiar images - "When we finally broke down her door we found/ A white curtain flapping in the open window - / As if waving goodbye" (p.5). There are lists of surprise lines -

• "We all laughed at the decomposing clown,/ But later shame sunk upon us/ And we got smashed on the balcony.// I had lost my left shoe in the blood./ The doyenne and her ten attachés/ Scattered blossom on the divans", p.8.
• "A pig fell out of the sky./ It landed poorly, but was not wounded./ 'Tell me,' said the pig, 'of cruelty;/ Tell me of the sweet, stale smoke on your fingertips;/ Tell me of your tinnitus and your unsightly body hairs.'", p.10.
• "Language is the butter/ You rub on a pirate" (p.16)

There are nonsense poems, and poems like "Gerald Variations" that have a structure.

Carrie Etter sometimes lists her favourite passages from books she's reading, which usefully provides examples of the poet's work. But sometimes, having had my appetite whetted by samples, I've been disappointed by the books, which don't transcend the sum of their parts. If poets are going to divide their words into titled sections (in a book - as opposed to a magazine submission - there's no great reason why they should), readers might reasonably expect sections to have some coherence. Kennard's notion of coherence varies. Occasionally there's a narrative thread. Sometimes juxtaposition is used (most commonly in the form of lists). There are somewhat uneasy combinations - "Popular Cults of the First Millennium" for example is a list of some one-liners along with 2 unrelated short narratives. When a poem starts as follows, there's no guarantee that the narrative will be continued.

Bedazzled Crow The butterflies tick like metronomes over The music college's dry ice sculpture: Amorphous No.14. under which I am publicly Clipping my nails on the off-beat

Why break the line where he does? Why end the poem where he does? If the poet didn't want us to worry about these questions he wouldn't have posed them (and indeed later in the book he doesn't). I like several of the book's sentences. I'm less sure than I like enough of any of the poems. "The Tree" fails. "Ear" and "Eyes" don't appeal, yet I like "Chorus". The longer pieces towards the end don't work for me.

I sympathize with his approach. Perhaps with Nobody's Perfect I edge towards his off-beat humorous style. I don't think I can emulate his version of surrealism, and I can't do nonsense.

Other reviews

• Sarah Crown (True to the European surrealist tradition of Baudelaire and Breton, in whose footsteps he is clearly following, Kennard's collection proves that humour is a neglected but effective tool in the poet's arsenal.)
• Tim Markey (Kennard’s collection is superb throughout and includes always ambitious and sometimes difficult poetry.)
• Rob McKenzie (not only funny — it’s intelligent, satirical, and very well written into the bargain.)
• Simon Turner
• poetryarchive.org (Kennard's Python-esque poems often elaborate surreal narratives, given a deadpan concreteness by excessively mundane details)
• Phil Brown (Kennard’s poetry has always hinged on the tension of self-aware, deconstructive wit undermining the desire to achieve emotional honesty. From his debut collection onwards, Kennard’s most entertaining works often read like an esoteric, polysyllabic riff on the antagonism between ventriloquist and dummy. His previous creations include the recurring character of ‘The Wolf’, the sadistic social worker in ‘The Murderer’)