Review: Sick Power Trip, by Erik Kennedy

Back in the day when I was a high school English teacher, I would spend a lesson discussing definitions of poetry with my Form 7/Year 13.

We'd take Wordsworth's poetry is 'emotion recollected in tranquillity''; then read a couple of Siegfried Sassoon's more savage war verses. I'd mention Eliot's 'the complete consort dancing together', after which we'd look at Allen Ginsberg's flailing Howl. Sometimes I'd mention Horace's ancient dictum that poetry should provide moral guidance, then introduce Baxter's gloriously bawdy Letter to Sam Hunt.

We'd end up accepting that poetry essentially eludes any definition. As Bill Manhire (yes, apologies for the name-tossing) wrote, it's '….the thing that can't be paraphrased'.

New Jersey-born, Otautahi Christchurch-based Erik Kennedy's third collection implies its own definitions or understandings of the form. It's an instantly energetic and lively assembly. Paula Green – last of the names, I swear – called Kennedy's earlier work 'exuberant', and that's a pretty apposite description of these hundred pages.

There's a strongly, satisfyingly satirical vein, towards individuals, ideas, institutions. Smugness is skewered; pretentiousness is popped. It can happen via apparently innocuous details: 'I think we're getting fewer paper towels per roll / than we did formerly'. It's often done with an underlying compassion, an acceptance that behind nearly every prat, there's a person.

The same controlled compassion glints in the poems which speak on behalf of the distressed and dispossessed, the speaker for whom '(w)atching my bank balance drop became my new favourite sport'.

The emotional range grows, widely and effectively. There are gentler, almost nostalgic works: we hear about the stolen belt featuring Karl Marx's face, that fits the writer's CV for six months. We hear of happy, harmless Hippiedom: 'Look, the fact that I once dragged my friends / to the park at three in the morning to hug a tree / does not make me a 'tree-hugger.'

We get a part-wistful look back at 2022, 'when climate activists were deflating the tyres of gas-guzzling SUVs...when footballers wore nasal strips'. It leads into both a flick against government and corporate repression, and to the rebellious pleasures that follow a night when you're 'emmbracing the darkness between moonbeams and streetlights'.

They're often pleasingly subversive and/or affirmative pieces, open to surprise or even wonder. A man on a bus switches almost magically from booming English to soft French. Love and daring can liberate: '..dance in the woods with the foxfire / and tumble in beds of tamarisk'.

They can be eclectic and erudite. Low-Carbon Warfare, a mischievously macabre meditation on solar-fuelled Army drones, vegan soldiers, an algae-pwered Navy ship, comes with acknowledgements to 43 separate sources. Kennedy is personal, then almost global: 'as sure as Russian oligarchs fall out windows...// as sure as writers lie about reading Joyce'.

Many are prose poems. There are also deft semi-rhymes, condensed couplets that edge towards haiku or koan. Just a few times, you feel the author nudging you at the moral or meaning. Much more frequently, you feel his delight in, and attention to, language. He can be pleasingly precise – 'A year is a road / that ends at the sea'. He can be equally pleasingly elusive; try the story of a thorn pulled from a lion's paw and the jolt it brings.

I haven't met Erik Kennedy, but after reading Sick Power Trip (he's also excellent with titles), I ended up, well, liking the guy. He has one of the more memorable moustaches in NZ lit, which makes him interesting. He's co-editor of an anthology on climate change, which makes him admirable. This book shows that he's a rewarding, agreeably wry word-wrangler as well.