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Tertiary Colours: A Post-Traumatic Verse
Tertiary Colours is a poetic attempt to exorcise demons, to build new bridges, and to shelter one's self from storms. Written in an experimental, concrete style, Tertiary Colours examines Aaron Kent's life through the various traumatic events he has experienced.
Praise:
‘Aaron Kent’s Tertiary Colours is at once frenetic and fine-tuned, raw and refined, excoriating and exhilarating.’
- Man Booker Prize nominated author: Wyl Menmuir (The Many)
~
‘There’s darkness. There’s dirt. There are snakes and there are demons. On the surface, this collection of poems seems like a vodka-induced nightmare. But at its core, Tertiary Colours is the untold story of trauma begging you with every page to unravel its intricate parts and let it be heard. And when it is, the walls bleed.’
- Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry winner: Amanda Lovelace (The Princess Saves Herself in this One)
~
‘Like haibun, these poems take us through a journey punctuated by a dazzling, concise moment to contemplate. Yet rather than an external voyage, we arc through controlled fury, gnashing grief, and, ultimately, love. Kent shows us what it means to look into the self, its depths. Dare to take this journey. You will emerge with a different head.’
- Robert Peake (The Knowledge)
~
‘A frank, stark and thorough unearthing of one man’s trauma from day one. A poetic cluster-bomb of drug abuse, night sweats and bi-polarity which offer raw and brave insight into mental illness. Toxic and intoxicating soul mining from a smart, fresh poet.’
- Daniel Roy Connelly (Extravagant Stranger: A Memoir, Donkey See Donkey Do)
~
'This is a sequence of poems that moves fluidly from dreams to living nightmares to abuse, sculpting language with a cinematic surrealism, and always experimenting with form. The poems are raw, and some of them bleed like the wounds from the poet's past. But the poems have a strict formal discipline as well. There is an urgent sense of using words-- and the spaces between them-- as a way to reveal, and crack open, a heightened poetic awareness. The language cuts and bruises, and is filled with killer lines that grab you by the throat, pierce you in the veins, jolt you awake.'
- Playwright and poet, Siddhartha Bose (Kalagora and Digital Monsoon)
Praise:
‘Aaron Kent’s Tertiary Colours is at once frenetic and fine-tuned, raw and refined, excoriating and exhilarating.’
- Man Booker Prize nominated author: Wyl Menmuir (The Many)
~
‘There’s darkness. There’s dirt. There are snakes and there are demons. On the surface, this collection of poems seems like a vodka-induced nightmare. But at its core, Tertiary Colours is the untold story of trauma begging you with every page to unravel its intricate parts and let it be heard. And when it is, the walls bleed.’
- Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry winner: Amanda Lovelace (The Princess Saves Herself in this One)
~
‘Like haibun, these poems take us through a journey punctuated by a dazzling, concise moment to contemplate. Yet rather than an external voyage, we arc through controlled fury, gnashing grief, and, ultimately, love. Kent shows us what it means to look into the self, its depths. Dare to take this journey. You will emerge with a different head.’
- Robert Peake (The Knowledge)
~
‘A frank, stark and thorough unearthing of one man’s trauma from day one. A poetic cluster-bomb of drug abuse, night sweats and bi-polarity which offer raw and brave insight into mental illness. Toxic and intoxicating soul mining from a smart, fresh poet.’
- Daniel Roy Connelly (Extravagant Stranger: A Memoir, Donkey See Donkey Do)
~
'This is a sequence of poems that moves fluidly from dreams to living nightmares to abuse, sculpting language with a cinematic surrealism, and always experimenting with form. The poems are raw, and some of them bleed like the wounds from the poet's past. But the poems have a strict formal discipline as well. There is an urgent sense of using words-- and the spaces between them-- as a way to reveal, and crack open, a heightened poetic awareness. The language cuts and bruises, and is filled with killer lines that grab you by the throat, pierce you in the veins, jolt you awake.'
- Playwright and poet, Siddhartha Bose (Kalagora and Digital Monsoon)
34 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2018
About the author
Aaron Kent
47 books52 followersAaron Kent is a working class poet and publisher born and raised in Cornwall. He runs Broken Sleep Books and has had several pamphlets released. J H Prynne called his poetry 'Unicorn flavoured' and how do you top that?
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 5, 2018
Tertiary Colours: A Post-Traumatic Verse is a difficult book that touches on some very difficult themes. It's difficult in the best sense: resistant, material, crystalline. It resists simple readings and rewards re-reading. Parts of it are hard to read on the level of subject matter, for example: '[won’t piss with dirty fingers because it may feel like his grip again, the coarseness of his flesh, the dexterity of his digits].' However, this intensity is always warranted.
It's a book in sections that moves between prose/prose poetry, verse, and a kind of hybrid prose/poetry with slashes for virtual line breaks. It ends with a poem, 'Djöfaðirullin Parade', that breaks with the preceding structure.
Kent merges science, mythology, geopolitical atrocity in the news media with a biographical tendency that is always complicated and problematised, in part by the self-consciousness provoked by the inclusion of the editor as a kind of character in the work: for example, 'The editor wants something a little more oblique, a little less opaque. Let the reader watch you / dissolve.' At least one section, XVII, is directly about PTSD nightmares, but all the sections are by turns dreamlike and feverishly awake with insomniac rumination.
The central conceit really appealed to me (I've been thinking about colour theory a bit recently). Without labouring the metaphor too much, the conceit isn't developed in broad primary colours but instead pops up in the corner of the reader's eye. It's tantalisingly unstable and polyvalent.
Tertiary Colours is the kind of book that will appeal to different readers (or even the same reader on different days) in very different ways. I'll spend the rest of this review describing one of the poignant and surprising ways it cracked open for me.
One word that arrested me is 'pikatrapp'. The second time it appears in this book, it's near the phrases 'I never meant to be repetitive' and 'broken records', which started me thinking about the looping of sound, and how trauma entails the involuntary ('I never meant to') repetition of terrible events from the past in memory, dreams and flashbacks.
I googled 'pikatrapp' and the only results are other works by Kent, specifically poems here and here. This fact adds a further layer to the repetition: Kent is repeating himself not just within a single text but across texts and years. One of these online poems ends with 'Do you know how to get out // of that repetition?'
One way to get out of that repetition might be, paradoxically, by running the obsession into the ground, until it becomes pure sound. By section XIV, the word 'pikatrapp' has metastasised to fill almost a whole page. Here it's onomatopoeia. It's something the speaker's body does: 'When I climb stairs I pikatrapp pikatrapp pikatrapp [...]'. On the one hand, this is horrifying: even something as innocuous and background (or tertiary?) as the sounds of climbing stairs are the sonic equivalent Rorschach ink blots that take the form of the trauma the speaker cannot forget. Looked at another way, there could be potential for liberation as the trauma moves from the mind into the music of the body, becoming something as meaningless (and disturbing) as tinnitus.
By section XXII, the word has been decomposed altogether into two parts of a portmanteau, when its parts appear as part of a long list of things the speaker wants to write about 'I want to write of [...] pika, and trapp'. A pika is a small mammal from Asia. Trapp is harder to pin down, but it makes me think of the surname, trap music, and a trap for a small animal like a pika. Again, the distinction between what the speaker wants to write about ('pika, and trapp') and the compound obsession-word that the speaker does repeatedly write may be salient here.
This is just one strand in Kent's intricate theory of trauma which is also an aesthetic of repetition. In a very moving way, this network of sound and memory enriches the words that deal more directly with trauma, like 'Forget to tell new people that I was touched by some dude in some way.'
Reading Tertiary Colours made me remember a great range of things, and, of necessity, forget many things as I moved from section to section. You'll find your own obsessions in its obsessions.
It's a book in sections that moves between prose/prose poetry, verse, and a kind of hybrid prose/poetry with slashes for virtual line breaks. It ends with a poem, 'Djöfaðirullin Parade', that breaks with the preceding structure.
Kent merges science, mythology, geopolitical atrocity in the news media with a biographical tendency that is always complicated and problematised, in part by the self-consciousness provoked by the inclusion of the editor as a kind of character in the work: for example, 'The editor wants something a little more oblique, a little less opaque. Let the reader watch you / dissolve.' At least one section, XVII, is directly about PTSD nightmares, but all the sections are by turns dreamlike and feverishly awake with insomniac rumination.
The central conceit really appealed to me (I've been thinking about colour theory a bit recently). Without labouring the metaphor too much, the conceit isn't developed in broad primary colours but instead pops up in the corner of the reader's eye. It's tantalisingly unstable and polyvalent.
Tertiary Colours is the kind of book that will appeal to different readers (or even the same reader on different days) in very different ways. I'll spend the rest of this review describing one of the poignant and surprising ways it cracked open for me.
One word that arrested me is 'pikatrapp'. The second time it appears in this book, it's near the phrases 'I never meant to be repetitive' and 'broken records', which started me thinking about the looping of sound, and how trauma entails the involuntary ('I never meant to') repetition of terrible events from the past in memory, dreams and flashbacks.
I googled 'pikatrapp' and the only results are other works by Kent, specifically poems here and here. This fact adds a further layer to the repetition: Kent is repeating himself not just within a single text but across texts and years. One of these online poems ends with 'Do you know how to get out // of that repetition?'
One way to get out of that repetition might be, paradoxically, by running the obsession into the ground, until it becomes pure sound. By section XIV, the word 'pikatrapp' has metastasised to fill almost a whole page. Here it's onomatopoeia. It's something the speaker's body does: 'When I climb stairs I pikatrapp pikatrapp pikatrapp [...]'. On the one hand, this is horrifying: even something as innocuous and background (or tertiary?) as the sounds of climbing stairs are the sonic equivalent Rorschach ink blots that take the form of the trauma the speaker cannot forget. Looked at another way, there could be potential for liberation as the trauma moves from the mind into the music of the body, becoming something as meaningless (and disturbing) as tinnitus.
By section XXII, the word has been decomposed altogether into two parts of a portmanteau, when its parts appear as part of a long list of things the speaker wants to write about 'I want to write of [...] pika, and trapp'. A pika is a small mammal from Asia. Trapp is harder to pin down, but it makes me think of the surname, trap music, and a trap for a small animal like a pika. Again, the distinction between what the speaker wants to write about ('pika, and trapp') and the compound obsession-word that the speaker does repeatedly write may be salient here.
This is just one strand in Kent's intricate theory of trauma which is also an aesthetic of repetition. In a very moving way, this network of sound and memory enriches the words that deal more directly with trauma, like 'Forget to tell new people that I was touched by some dude in some way.'
Reading Tertiary Colours made me remember a great range of things, and, of necessity, forget many things as I moved from section to section. You'll find your own obsessions in its obsessions.
Displaying 1 of 1 review