Beschreibung:
Notes on the Sonnets is intoxicating – a kind of stream of semi-consciousness, at once alert (there are substances involved) and dazed, disorientated (there is rum involved). Sentences make your head spin, then hurt: in 154 poems, there are seemingly numberless ideas, observations, aphorisms, characters. [...] Any party, like any poem, can be surreal and self-conscious; but only the best ones revolve around love – the way we make and unmake it, the way the mind whirls under its influence.
Katherine Cowles, New Statesman
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021Longlisted for the Rathbones folio prizeA Poetry Book society RecommendationLuke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse.'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.'- Caroline Bird