Sick Power Trip

What do you do when confronted by the current and impending horrors of today’s world? If you’re a poet, you face up squarely in the best way you know. And in Erik Kennedy’s case, this means writing a collection titled Sick Power Trip. Here are poems that take their themes from both human behaviour and the natural world and couch them in language that dispenses with disguise. From wistful to cynical, from challenging to harshly judgemental, Kennedy dissects what we’re experiencing with poetic deftness.

I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself is an especially graphic example, with grandly cynical lines like “Billionaires are just ordinary people / who throw away / their electric toothbrushes / every night.” Yet such cynicism is balanced by the poet’s acknowledgement of our shameful commonality.

Enclosure of the Commons 11 is a nostalgic reference to old-style ownership. Yet it asks the question “Can anything really be ‘owned’?” and concludes with “You don’t get very far saying / that everything belongs to everybody.” By contrast, Soft Power looks to a time when animals could not only speak but were to prove more entertaining than humans! “They were oracles, troubadours, bards, soothsayers, heartthrobs.” If only!

Wistfulness forms part of Kennedy’s poetic vocabulary. It’s best exemplified in An Only Child Poem in which an overheard conversation in French on the bus suggests that the speaker is paying tribute to a beloved mother: “his dear mother who wanted the world / for him to be big and full of boulevard views”.

Most searing of all perhaps is one of Kennedy’s concluding poems: Bystander Poem; or a Gaza Poem which begins with “If you can listen to the stories and not shudder, / you have a refrigerated beetroot for a heart.” Graphic, thrusting, and a cold reminder of our universal awfulness. We may not be complicit, our poet seems to say, but we’re not exempt.

Sick Power Trip is a saddening and salutary journey into self-awareness made universal.