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The Rink
The Rink is a chapbook that looks at three different the potential for nuclear war, life as working-class, and starting a new family. Aaron Kent merges these three ideas into poetry that is layered over various found pieces of paper, including his dissertation cover sheet, old drafts of poems, snippets from a Pat Arrowsmith poetry book, a sketch of a crab Aaron found once, and things he drew with his eyes closed.
32 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2018
About the author
Aaron Kent
54 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 - 1 of 1 review
April 7, 2018
The Rink is a beautiful pamphlet born from the wreckage of environmental disaster and under the threat of nuclear war. ('The ice caps were still ideas / rather than liquid forms' is one Platonic angle on climate change.) The book maps a working class personal history onto this historical backdrop through the physical layering of Kent's poems over older, annotated drafts, over an OS map and alongside collage, sketches, ornamentation in marker pen and even Kent's BA dissertation (where Godzilla meets nuclear war).
One poem includes the words 'you are aware of every mistake I made in transcribing my old notes onto sheet music.' This book revels in the aesthetic of those mistakes. The 'old notes', text written on scrap paper or on a printed draft of a poem, transform into the notes in a musical stave. Each page can be seen as such a note in a musical arrangement (or flower arrangement, given one of the illustrations). The whole swims before a reader's eyes, as if they've spent just the right amount of time in an art gallery.
There are moments of ingenious wordplay ('cower less, coward less, courage lest [...]') and these never distract from the gentle, insistent music of the whole. Kent reuses materials and a poem by Pat Arrowsmith, co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, making the book a chorus by a wider activist movement as well as Kent's present and past selves.
The Rink not just something pretty to skate over, a book to hunker over in a bunker at the end of the world. Its aesthetic is profoundly political, and for all its focus on history, it speaks to now.
One poem includes the words 'you are aware of every mistake I made in transcribing my old notes onto sheet music.' This book revels in the aesthetic of those mistakes. The 'old notes', text written on scrap paper or on a printed draft of a poem, transform into the notes in a musical stave. Each page can be seen as such a note in a musical arrangement (or flower arrangement, given one of the illustrations). The whole swims before a reader's eyes, as if they've spent just the right amount of time in an art gallery.
There are moments of ingenious wordplay ('cower less, coward less, courage lest [...]') and these never distract from the gentle, insistent music of the whole. Kent reuses materials and a poem by Pat Arrowsmith, co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, making the book a chorus by a wider activist movement as well as Kent's present and past selves.
The Rink not just something pretty to skate over, a book to hunker over in a bunker at the end of the world. Its aesthetic is profoundly political, and for all its focus on history, it speaks to now.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review