NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
ANDY BROWN: HUNTING THE KINNAYAS
Stride
4b Tremayne Close
Devoran
Cornwall
TR3 6QE
UK ISBN 1 900152 94 0
£7.50

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ANDY BROWN: HUNTING THE KINNAYAS

This is an exciting mix of prose and poems and prose poems all scented with a pinch of tongue-in-cheek Borges — there are references to learned texts which may or may not exist — SINBAD IN BRITAIN supposedly taken from a manuscript in Exeter Cathedral Library and THE DIARY OF A HUMAN BEING, a sequence of faux reportage — and a smattering of Auster, with an ingenious mise en abyme in the interacting texts entitled THE AUTHOR and the THE HYDROAKTYLOPICHHARMONICA.

And that is all part of the fun. There are birds and tigers and Bird Island Discs and Audubon hiding in the bushes. The ABECEDARY OF BIRDS is a remarkable tour de plume, with only the letters U X and Z baffling our hero and sending him rushing to scrumptious Latin names. It is lovely to find someone who just takes pleasure in words for words' sake, who obviously goes to sleep murmuring 'kittiwakes' and 'nuthatches' to himself. A MYTHOLOGY OF BIRDS is another good example:

	May the Gadwall of Foula
	unite with the Serin of Saltee
	and the Turnstone of Fetlar
	befriend the Great Pochard of Noss.
The prose poems lull you along on a flow of sound, as in FROM FIELD NOTES
Towards the river's seaward turn the flow is slow, meandering. Wide tidal flats at the sea's low tide support a spread of hungry birds. Silt brought down from inland fans the delta, between the reeds. Here molluscs and crustaceans breed. To the eyes of walkers on sterile dunes, where only the lonely skylark nests in monotonous marram and shifting sand, the estuarine mud-flats seem a bland expanse.
It's not all ornithological, but I have a personal preference for the bird pieces!

reviewer: Jacqueline Karp.