| quotes and extracts from reviews. |
|
This moving collection shows how a sensitive man
can use poetry to share in the feelings of others at home and abroad
|
Denis Healey.
|
|
a moving collection, lifetime's work
|
Moonstone.
|
|
Memorials to lost friends, praise for the real achievements of humankind and
anger at the perfidy of politics as in Millenium — Lose or Win?: "Why bother?
It's nothing but the fag-end/ Of a thousand years; Mankind's lust for war/
Unquenched, the politicians squawk for more;/And get it."
|
Handshake (John Francis Haines).
|
|
A very powerful booklet, made all the more stark as I read this after the
New York/Washington/Pennsylvania atrocities. There's pity in the poetry,
but a strength which veers away from the sickly sentimental.
|
Eastern Rainbow (Paul Rance).
|
|
Many of the poems here are sonnets ..When you get used to the retro feel of these, you have to admit
that something like the existential "On Man's Condition" hits the nail on the head, the sonnet form
lending clarity to Kirk's philosophical musings. ..The anti-Vietnam War piece "Perspective—With Postcript"
..comes across as particularly strong. ..It is a feeling accentuated by the poem's free verse;
here we experience emotion unmediated by an intricate rhyme scheme. ..Kirk can
occasionally be insightful about human nature. ..he is a competent writer, his craft generally well-honed.
|
The Burning Bush (Michael S. Begnal).
|
|
A collected occasional poetry, reaching back some fifty years and heavily populated
by the sonnet, from someone who is clearly a kindly and sensitive man. I responded
to the poems' pulse of indignation and anger, and especially liked the attack of
poems like RETRIBUTION and SONNET FOR VLADIMIR - The fruit of that forbidden tree is ours/
At last the individual has won!/ Drink Coke and eat McDonalds' meals for hours... whilst
wincing at Ken Kirk's use of archaic language - aglaze, plight, incarnadined.
|
The Journal (Paul Lee).
|
|
Ken Kirk writes with passion about political subjects. The actual subjects might not be
political, (in fact they cover a crippled musician, an African student, a radio broadcast
on Angola, and his personal reaction to music on February 6th/7th 1998, as well as the
impact of steel and the night shift), but he writes to
champion the underclass universally, from Scotland, with fire in his belly.
It is characterful writing, in a traditional mode, in historic perspective -
casting a cynical eye on hypocrisy; and good, for it meets its purpose.
|
Pulsar (Janie Thomas).
|
|
Kirk's writing ... is a brawny, tough mingling of the topical, the valedictory,
the angry and the political. I can see that I'm going to have to keep reading.
|
James Methven (Oriel College, Oxford).
|
|
seriously interesting material.
|
Krax (Andy Robson).
|
