Reviews
Seven League Stilletos by Jane Kinninmont,
90 pp, ISBN 0 9542397 6 8, Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm,
Snitterfield, Warwickshire CV 37 OLR, A5, 2004.
There is a sense that something cheerful is going on all the time just beneath the surface of Kinninmont's work. I refer not only to the sequences that are weak at the knees with love, or to the poems echoing with the oooh's and aaah's of a firework display, or the happy incongruity of the Buddha taking a psychometric test; indeed all of these, and many others, left me smiling. But at the other end of the scale, when your lover has deserted you and the only things that can come near to expressing your anger and your pain are thunder and rain and darkness, does this poet eschew the pathetic fallacy, as the well-behaved writer ought to do? No, she does not. She goes right ahead with the bad weather, facing out the critics by entitling the poem Pathetic Fallacy. This sort of defiant cheerfulness pervades the collection.
Some of the poems have more enthusiasm than style, and some overstretch themselves, going where they do not need to go, as when the word "mysterious" intrudes unnecessarily in Bedtime Story, a competent poem that is mysterious enough without the telling of it. But on the whole, the writing is clever and funny and original, adventurous with vocabulary, playing around (and I mean playing) with form and style. The Rhetoric Generator is a circular prose poem of strangely compelling rhetorical nonsense, which ends only when the page does, otherwise it could go on for ever. Always observant, Kinninmont can be introspective or objective; in Looking at You she is both, I think -
When it's not nicely symmetrical,
the uncanny, obsessive strangeness of love
stands out in bare obscenity.
There are writers whose technique is flawless but who have nothing to say that I want to hear. I like what this writer has to say. As a poet, she has made an impressive start.
Page(s) 20
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