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Luke Kennard is the author of four volumes of poetry and two pamphlets. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.<p>Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.</p>
- Nick Laird, The Telegraph
<p>There is a considerable intelligence and stylishness in his wry domestication of the beautiful swerves and non-sequiturs of Ashbery's poems, plus a high degree of overt self-consciousness: several poems discuss and undermine their own procedures, or disarm potential criticism. Their main charm, though, is that they are – with their engagingly downbeat, faux-naïve narrators – genuinely funny.</p>
- Robert Potts, The Telegraph
<p>Hailed as a witty wunderkind in the poetry world, 26-year-old Kennard starts with contemporary cultural slickness and moves brilliantly into the surreal. Truly, a poet to watch</p>
- Christina Patterson, The Independent
<p><em>The Migraine Hotel</em>, by Luke Kennard (Salt): Luke Kennard's <em>The Harbour Beyond the Movie</em> was that rare commodity: a poetry collection both excellent and laugh-out-loud funny. His latest offering – in which he considers heartbreak, despair and the pleasures of schadenfreude via his own sui generis brand of didactic humour – doesn't disappoint. Fans will be delighted by the return of Wolf, who this time ventures into the fields of psychotherapy and national identity ("'Fortunately my mother was Opus Dei and my father a Methodist,' says the wolf. 'Thus, on Tuesdays, I am Catholic in the mornings and Protestant in the afternoons'").</p>
- Sarah Crown, The Guardian
A combination of verse and prose poetry, ‘The Migraine Hotel’ is Luke Kennard’s third collection and very much a sequel to ‘The Harbour Beyond the Movie’. The voices continue to explore the territory opened up by Harbour, at once satiric, stricken, sincere and bitingly sarcastic, combined with a kaleidoscopic range of ways of engaging with a poem as a reader. The prose poems are prose poems in the tradition of Baudelaire, which is to say they read more like grouchy comic monologues with unreliable narrators than prose-verse characterised by excessive lyricism.
This is another sensational collection from Luke Kennard packed with humour and his heady mix of crazy animistic narrators and surreal mise-en-scène. Taking off from his much celebrated second collection, The Harbour Beyond the Movie which was shortlisted for the 2007 Forward Prize for Poetry.
- My Friend
- The Dusty Era
- Variations On Tears
- And I Saw
- Four Neighbours
- The Six Times My Heart Broke
- Bestiary For The Seven Days
- Estate
- Wolf Nationalist
- No Stars
- Pleasure Beach
- Army
- Wolf on the Couch
- Grapefruit
- Childhood
- My First Impulse is Always to Take the Bigger Portion, the Unchipped Cup, the Cleaner Glass
- The Awakening
- Painful Revisions
- The Forms Of Despair
- Repetition
- A Terrorist, Maybe, With His Children
- The Last Days of Advertising
- A Dog Descends
- Addiction Clinic
- Five Poems For A New Shopping Centre
- A Sure-Fire Sign
- Trombone
- Men Made of Words
- from Sexual Fantasies Of The Inuit Warriors
- Spade
- Gravedigger?:?The Movie
And I Saw
A false prophet slapped in the face by a wave;
A woman screaming at her clarinet,
‘What would you have me do, then, drown you, too?’
Remaindered novels washed up on the shore.
A cat, baffled by a drowsy lobster, jogged
Over the pebbles towing a little carriage.
And the cat didn’t say anything – because
It was a cat. And the carriage was not full
Of tiny men, a watermelon or an
Assembly of diplomatic mice
Because the carriage was an example
Of man’s cruelty in the name of research.
The cat belonged to a behaviourist
And had been raised in an environment
Of only black horizontal lines. So
It saw my sprinting across the beach
To dismantle its harness as a whirl
Of fenceposts and orange rubber balls
And was gone faster than the better idea
You had a moment ago. Leaving me
Only the seagull’s dreadful anthem?:
‘I just want to tell you how sad we all feel.’
The airplane trail made the cloud a wick –
I thought I saw it starting to burn down
And I knew we had been lucky to avoid
Disaster so far. I shared a bench with
A man who wanted to redefine us
As victims of one kind or another
Instead of whatever names we’d chosen:
Steven Victim, Jenny Victim, Franklin
Victim. I disagreed but couldn’t speak.
He ate raw mushrooms from a paper bag.
In fact it was a computer game called
The Enormous Pointlessness of it All III.
When you are raised on computer games
You grow accustomed to saying ‘I’m dead,’
Several times a day. Which is not to say
We are the first generation to feel
So comfortable with our mortality.