Kathleen Kenny
Kathleen Kenny lives and writes in Newcastle upon Tyne. She works as a part-time creative writing lecturer for Sunderland University.
Kathleen Kenny's sense of colour is the life force blazing through this collection. It is the means by which she re-enters by turn the landscapes of childhood, adolescence and motherhood, before diving into the elemental world of fire: the primitive and eternal territories of love loss loathing and desire.
Her new collection from Red Squirrel is Keening with Spittal Tongues.
About Kathleen Kenny | Two poems from Firesprung: Fire Myth | Dexterity | Reviews
ISBN 978-1-906700-01-1
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Reviews for Kenny's latest collection Goose Tales and Other Flights (Koo Press 2007):
Kathleen Kenny has a spare strong individual style ...The poems are ... taut and visually sharp [and] intensely lyrical ... Kenny is in command of an elegant and passionate poetic style.
NHI
Kathleen Kenny explores the edge of myth her delicate poems coaxing us to reconsider the metaphor of goose ... [she] leads us gently there. Sphinx. Clear confident and perfectly at ease with allegory.
Tom Kelly
I was so impressed.
Charles Johnson, Flarestack
The poems ... are sky-creatures singing in and out and through the clouds that hang over us all. A most engaging collection.
Brendan Kennelly
By the age of thirteen, Kathleen Kenny had been summed up by most of her school teachers and her headmistress, Miss Futter, as Lazy, Apathetic, and Lethargic. This has left her with big boots to fill: being LAL, and also a good Catholic goes against the fashionable contention that any paid employment is the Holy Grail. It is not. If Kathleen ever gets rich she says she will do what she did for the twenty idle years she spent as a full-time, dependent, non-working mother: she will laze about indulging her writing passion, which acts as surrogate for her now wonderfully grown-up, and independent children.
What is Kathleen currently reading? The book by her bedside is:
Irvine Welsh's latest collection of short stories: If You Liked School, You'll Love Work.
Fire Myth
The first time we made love
was late one Saturday
on the floor by the fire.
It was planned out,
no light, only an apricot glow
flickering on the mat.
We were actors
in a grand romance.
We glowed peach,
our limbs licked,
blazing fruit from coal.
But it was early yet, still spring,
and there was always something
in this place:
creaks and aches,
groans and mutterings.
The dead servants
on the top floor,
their sexless frippery rustling,
a howling gale
blowing under the door.
Dexterity
Your mobile matches the tight lime jumper
you just bought from H & M.
I pour myself tea and relax
while you drink, eat and text.
Your thumb has become steroid thick,
is loud and quick as a moped.
The lad on the next bench
looks like that TV ad's Benefit Cheat.
He sneaks a hand into his jacket,
brings out a trembling phone.
It is mooing like a cow.
He speaks to it to calm it down..
Review from Other Poetry | Review from Pennine Platform | Review by James Kirkup
From Other Poetry
Kathleen Kenny's Firesprung (Red Squirrel Press £6.99) starts with a strong, mysterious poem, Dad with Bucket and Spade:
The flames are turning green,
it's a sign,
There was a time
when you could read fire.
There was a place like this
with a box of sticks in every room,
coal buckets
kept perpetually full;
scenes and shades
that blaze through,
like the thrall of the seaside train
suddenly arriving.
At once it establishes the imagery of fire and colour which will be the dominant elements throughout the book, and an agenda - to 'read fire'. In six couplets Kenny sets the scene so that we are both looking back to the house of the poet's childhood and also ahead to the verses and stanzas - the 'rooms' - of the book and the poem in front of us. The 'full coal buckets' promise plenty of fire, the semi-colon after the fourth couplet signals a shift to what we will see in those flames, and leads us back to the surprising image of he last couplet.
The sound patterns threading through the poem mark and create its structure, the assonance between 'flames' in the first line, 'place' in the fifth and 'train' in the penultimate line is chiastically balanced with 'green' in the first line, 'read' in the fourth and 'scenes' in the ninth. Then there is the 'i' of 'sign', 'time', 'fire', 'like', 'seaside', 'arriving'. The half rhyme of 'coal', 'full' and 'thrall' knits the parts of the poem before and after the 'turn'.
This poem reminds me of the Heaney poem Digging, if only because of the title. It has a companion poem a few pages further on. Dad with Cigarette, where the sound imagery and the striking denouement of the last two lines are also reminiscent of Digging.
The book is in four parts. Part One contains poems about the poet's childhood, while Part Two moves towards the present. There is snow, weather and plenty of colour here, but no flames. Part Three returns to fire, the stars and the animal satires The Night of the Hunted. Mr Clean (with its wonderfully fresh-minted last word, 'inseparate') and The Enemy. Part Four follows the narrative of a relationship. It contains a sort of anti-fire poem in In the Drink which begins 'Under the sea/your reptile wings are useless.'
Kenny is at her best in her often surprising and synaesthetic imagery, like 'these full-bloomed nasturtiums... papering the room with dance' in Firewall or 'hear that crape crackle - yellow!' in Sensuous. She engages all the senses, using children's sweets, for example, to suggest taste, colour and texture, and with them all the memories of childhood, and in, Analysand, a sense of extreme vulnerability.
Sometimes her poems seem to fall, intriguingly, in pairs, such as Eventual and Banshee, or Amorphous and Premonition. This reflects a larger tendency to juxtapose images, with a complete naturalness, whether in the numerous intense short poems or in the poems where she builds up image after image to create a baroque structure, such as her Sestina on Knees and her two magnificent River Tyne poems River Tyne Refinement and All Saints. The non-sequiturs of everyday speech which pepper the book, such as in Argument and Talk Later give the poems narrative and humorous edge.
Josephine Dickinson, Other Poetry
From Pennine Platform No 64
Kathleen Kenny's latest collection from Red Squirrel Press is firmly rooted in her native Northumberland, but at the same time deals with more universal themes of adolescence, motherhood, sex, loneliness, all observed with a wry humour and a sharp observation of detail. In Newcastle's Grainger Market, the rich, colourful variety of juxtaposed offerings -
Meat hooks, claws, rabbits hung by paws,
second-hand book stalls, hams and eggs,
red-feathered hens, leather smells -
touches recollections of childhood and her mother, whilst Reflections from a Train Window suggest how half-seen images can evoke sudden, disturbing memories. Asthmatic recalls the tender moment of writing a note for a vulnerable daughter on her way to school whilst Dad with Cigarette combines a fascinated horror of phlegm fizzing on a poker, with a deep affection for its subject. These are strong, earthy, personal, poems, and the fire of the title is a constant leitmotif. To Kenny, fire is both destructive, yet, like sexuality, the vital force of life. Has there ever been a better description of the Lost Art of Making Fire:
The first whoosh of paper.
The excitement and the danger.
You forget how much tending
it takes. The coaxing of the black
into smoke. Then out of the blue
green flame, yellow fire.
Colin Speakman, Pennine Platform.
Reviewed by James Kirkup
"Firesprung is a spellbinding book. Kenny has a command of English speech patterns, especially the local idiom in all its brashness and stark humour, and it really illuminates almost every page. A gifted spinner of a very personal and always uniquely Geordie web of words.
It is notable that in the four divisions of the book there is a development both visual and audible. In part three fire poems, short, like the first whoosh of paper... The coaxing of the black / into smoke... Then out of the blue / green flame, yellow fire. Then comes Firewall:
I get into bed with the last
leaps of fire plastering the wall.
Sometimes things are squeeze through:
These full-bloomed narsturtiums
lovingly restored,
Papering the room with dance.
(Later) this is followed by the wonderful Little Death by Fire:
it's hard not to
have an asthma attack
having sex on the mat,
with your head bashing off the poker,
and your shoulder
pounding off the hearth...
...nothing stops Kenny's poetic couplings. There is a certain grim comedy in even the most passionate of (her) poetic explosions, as in Coitus Non Starter - a title that speaks for itself - begins:
You are lying on a rock
blind drunk. Should I finish
the half of this bottle
or pour it over your head?
This tumultuous part four is almost indescribable in its sub-comical intensities... (an) unusually gifted poet, once totally unknown to me, but on whose very special poetic gifts I shall look out for in the future.
James Kirkup