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New British Poetry 22: Kung Fu Lullabies and Seven League Stilettos

© Dr J D Ballam

Jane Kinninmont, describes herself as 'short, noisy, fond of cats and obsessed with clothes'; she has been the editor of four magazines, and has worked as a 'cheerful but incompetent bartender'. Now candour and self-deprecation of this kind in an author, especially one so young (she was born in 1981) is as winning as it is unusual. Not least because none of these qualities of shortness, fondness, obsession or incompetence distracts from the clarity or finesse of the poems included in her first collection, SEVEN LEAGUE STILETTOS (Snitterfield: Ragged Raven Press, 2004).

In fact, much of the work here is filled with surprise and unlooked-for verbal artistry. For example, my favourite poem is a little piece with a conventional enough beginning, entitled, 'I am Proud to Say':

I can escape any cage/ blindfolded, drugged,/ hands cuffed behind my back,/ and the whole shebang dangling/ upside down/ under thirty feet of water./ It would be a matter of seconds.

The poem continues expanding in this way for two more stanzas before shrinking in on itself with the final lines:

Only with you/ am I ever afraid,/ only with you/ do I fear/ accidents,/ breakings/ endings.

Other poems offer similarly abrupt shifts of tone, often achieved through sudden apt disruptions of syntax or register, like these lines from 'Fireworks, Clapham Common':

and there are explosions within explosions,/ like russian dolls gone fractal, each fragment/ flowering in flaring asterisks, and falling,

Or these, from 'Ice':

Drunk, and all/ the surface of the world is a/ glassy treachery a/ glittering ice trap./ I walk with/ enormous trepidation,/ epic fragility.

Occasionally, an otherwise unexceptional sentiment or experience is transformed by a magical line, like this one from 'The Moon in the Man':

He spins facts of straw into tales of gold.

While the collection can be a little uneven - for instance, I found 'The Rhetoric Generator' rather dull and self-conscious - it is, nevertheless a very competent debut collection, and there is considerable promise shown throughout. Reading SEVEN LEAGUE STILETTOS is like attending the first night's performance of a new diva - not every note is perfect, but the voice is strong, original and full of natural grace and vivacity.

Another recent offering from Ragged Raven is Chris Kinsey's KUNG FU LULLABIES (Snitterfield: Ragged Raven Press, 2004). There is a spontaneity about many of the poems here which, when fused with the gentle elegiac tone characteristic of the book as a whole, makes for some lovely reading. One of my favourite pieces is entitled, 'Just Once' which, even in this shortened version, balances direct declarative sentences with a wistfulness that is wholly indicative of childhood recollections:

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