Plymouth has become noted for its poetry scene – Steve Spence (who wrote about it in Tears in the Fence #66, #73, #78 and #82), Norman Jope (who wrote about it in #67), Mélisande Fitzsimons, Philip Kuhn and many more – but in choosing the poet most strongly associated with the city, you could make a good case for Kenny Knight. He’s lived there nearly all his seventy-plus years and his three earlier Shearsman books detail his urban adventures from its Honicknowle council estate and outwards. In a typical poem, Kenny Knight’s persona is wandering the streets like a Baudelairean flâneur or the O’Hara of Lunch Poems, while thinking about Plymouth’s past (Drake, Darwin, Nancy Astor, the Mayflower), his own past (plimsolls, bands, romances) and his contemporary concerns. The poems often take off into the fanciful, fuelled both by the general interests of his generation (rock music, America, Sixties TV) and his idiosyncratic ones (Lobsang Rampa, Llandegley International Airport, Rosemary Tonks). The local place-names and pop-cultural references get so rammed that the three most recent books provide a glossary for them.
It should be said that we Kenny Knight readers (those I know, anyhow) aren’t there for the prosodical chrome. Lines end at phrase-ends and stanzas end at sentence-ends. There’s no insistent audio-effect or vainglorious figuration or sublime wordplay or big-dictionary words or rhythmic whizz-bang. Nor are we there for philosophical heft or post-structuralist smirk or translations from the Medieval German. The allurements, besides the sense of place and the nostalgia, are the naturalised surrealism of English whimsy and the smart-silly stand-up lines. Stuff like: ‘The best part of the Cold War/ was Ski Sunday’; ‘I want to win the Nobel Prize for Literature/ in a penalty shoot-out’; ‘the literary quarter of Honicknowle:/Tennyson Gardens./ Byron Avenue./ Dickens Road.’; ‘I’m looking for a lover/ from the constellation of Pisces/ but can’t afford the airfare.’
Unfortunately, all those examples come from Kenny Knight’s first and sparkiest collection, The Honicknowle Book of the Dead. This latest one is far less lively. The quirky titles are gone. So are the quirky cover-shots, to be replaced by a grim wooden ruin under a louring sky. The themes are dark: ghosts, shadows, emptiness. The usual supporting cast (Queen Log, the Buckingham Shed Collective, Grand-daughter Grizzly, &c.) are absent. The city is hushed. And all because – as with so many recent collections – it’s Covid Time. In this episode, the narrator is not having fun. His walks are limited by decree. He’s ‘pretty much blind’. And lonely. And ‘sleep seems to have been/ not much longer than a sigh’. So there’s a bitterness to the nostalgic wit now
the clocks went back last night
but an hour isn’t far enough
along with general sadness
As the rain starts to tumble out of the air
it falls from your eyes in solidarity
and minor querulousness: ‘The radio […]/ doesn’t play much music that I like/ […] when do you ever hear/ any Bob Dylan […]’. Those once-ebullient flights towards the Wild West or stardom or city history are now being made as solace. The cowboy bandana doubles as a Covid mask. The Sixties TV that feels most apposite is The Prisoner. Some longer third-person poems bimble like directionless stories; in others the poet’s mind circles, flits, recircles, wobbles and plummets.
Of course, it’d be churlish of the readers to expect entertainment amidst an epidemic. And writers must needs defer to their emotions. And there are, inevitably, plenty of acute moments. A eulogy, for instance, for Nye Bevan:
clapping for the man who for me
is the grandfather I never had
the grandfather who gave my mother […]
a place to give birth to three children
But overall, this may be one for the hardcore fans. For Knight entrants, I’d recommend instead (or as well) The Honicknowle Book of the Dead; at least while we’re waiting with fingers crossed for this customarily off-beat and congenial poet’s next volume.
Guy Russell 1st June 2026
