David Amery reviews the collected poems of David Kessel
David Amery reviews the collected poems of David Kessel, issued in 2006 by Survivors Press, the publishing arm of an organisation that promotes the work of mental health service survivors. Amery opens with the irony that the book appeared just as that organisation lost its national arts funding, and he presents the volume as proof of why the survivor voice matters.
His main claim is that Kessel's poems stand on their own merits and need no special allowance. He finds in them an expressive force and a directness that established publishers and magazines overlooked. Song is a frequent image, whether as harsh beauty, resilience or a wild cry, and Amery contrasts this raw expressionism with the studied coolness favoured in more fashionable circles. The poems date from the early 1970s. An early piece set in Hampstead shows revolutionary idealism, but the poet's real voice emerges once he is writing about the estates of East London. Amery ties this to a loyal, home-grown socialism, with heroes such as the Diggers and Robert Tressell, and to a feeling for the outcast.
Three poems receive close attention. A poem about a community putting up its own slums is praised for elemental solidarity. My Inheritance sets scenes from a postwar childhood against the horrors of the Second World War, and Amery argues it escapes ordinary analysis and becomes its own music. The Brighton café poem, titled A Mug of Black Coffee, is admired for dissolving the boundary between the self and the world outside it. The reviewer also notes a short essay by Kessel included in the book and the plainer style of the later poems. Amery ends by calling the voice both ravaged and wonderful, and hopes the movement behind the book will endure.
- Work
- O the Windows of the Bookshop Must be Broken: Collected Poems of David Kessel
- Author
- David Kessel
- Publisher
- Survivors Press
Poems in this selection
- Glass is Dynamite
- My Inheritance
- A Mug of Black Coffee
At its best David's poetry is so exposed that it becomes like a field where thoughts and feelings cross
David Amery, The Wolf, issue 14