Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.
A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.
Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse.
'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.'- Caroline Bird
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Sometimes a party feels like a portal you have to pass through, sometimes not. TIRED WITH ALL THESE, FOR RESTFUL DEATH I ACRY (66)
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(@PennedintheM, 22 April 2021, ebook, 175 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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This is a new poet for me. Unfortunately, I didn't really connect with the poems on offer in this collection and I was very disappointed. I haven't read many of Shakespeare's sonnets so can't comment on how close these poems were to the originals. The main issue is that the pieces are not so much poems as page-length paragraphs of text. I don't tend to enjoy poems that use this very narrative structure as they come across more like short stories and I wanted poems. They made quite dense reading at times. I also wasn't over-impressed with each piece being set at a dull house party. I also found it strange that each poem had a title, clearly taken from one of Shakespeare's sonnets which seemed to have little connection to the poem as if chosen at random. I'm sure I missed the point of Notes on the Sonnets but it didn't work for me.