Ken Smith Collected: poem features, reviews & books of the year
A collected edition of the poetry of the late Ken Smith was published by Bloodaxe Books on 25 October 2018 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Bloodaxe’s first publication, Ken Smith’s pamphlet Tristan Crazy, and to mark what would have been Ken Smith’s 80th birthday.
Tristan Crazy was launched with a reading at Newcastle’s Morden Tower in October 1978. Ken Smith's posthumously-published Collected Poems was launched at a symposium at the University of Leeds on 9 November 2018. Contributors included Ken Smith’s partner, the poet Judi Benson, his publisher Neil Astley, and the editors of Stand magazine, which Ken Smith co-edited with Jon Silkin from 1963 to 1969. There was also an exhibition curated from the archive in Special Collections at Leeds University, where he read English as a mature student.
Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry whose work inspired a whole generation of younger British poets during the 1980s and 90s. His Collected Poems, introduced with essays by Roger Garfitt and Jon Glover, brings together poetry from four decades. It includes his iconic London poem ‘Fox Running’, which was the subject of a special edition of Poetry Please in February 2016, following the discovery of a cassette recording of Ken Smith reading the poem.
Ken Smith was born in Rudston, East Yorkshire, the son of an itinerant farm labourer. He worked in Britain and America as a teacher, freelance writer, barman, magazine editor, potato picker, BBC reader and creative writing fellow, and was writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1985-87. He received America’s highly prestigious Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1997, and a Cholmondeley Award in 1998.
POEM OF THE WEEK FEATURES
The Yorkshire Times, Poem of the Week, online 15 November 2022
Steve Whitaker chose the poem ‘Colden Valley’ from Ken Smith’s posthumously-published Collected Poems as his Poem of the Week in the online regional newspaper The Yorkshire Times on15 November 2022.
‘Few poets can hold time and landscape in one glass with the consummate skill of Ken Smith… As attuned to the brutality of moorland terrain as Hughes, and as sensitive to injustices meted out to the labouring classes of history as Jeffrey Wainwright, Smith’s starkly beautiful poem [‘Colden Valley’] draws the drama of landscape and its uses and misuses, of the obligations of work and of prayer, towards one condensed, and proleptic melting-point.’ – Steve Whitaker, Poem of the Week, The Yorkshire Times
Read the full feature here.
Steve Whitaker featured another poem from Ken Smith's Collected Poems in his Poem of the Week column on 21 October 2018
'...this Yorkshire-born poet looked squarely at the terrors of existence and, with a fixed gaze, tackled the comic and the tragic, and the tragic-comic, with equal alacrity, and with the moral outrage of an infinitely wise observer.' - Steve Whitaker in The Yorkshire Times, on Ken Smith
Steve Whitaker writes about 'Filmclip: Leningrad, October 1935' from Ken Smith's Collected Poems, in his Yorkshire Times Poem of the Week column here.
BOOKS OF THE YEAR COVERAGE FOR KEN SMITH
Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year, 29 November 2019
Sean O’Brien chose the late Ken Smith’s 2018 Collected Poems as one of his books of 2019 in the TLS.
'Ken Smith’s Collected Poems ought to put his remarkable body of work squarely before a younger audience. His widely travelled imagination, his invention and dramatic lyricism continue to shed light on the evil times he went some way to prophesy.' - Sean O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2019)
The Lonely Crowd, Books of the Year 2018 / Part One, online 9 December 2018
‘My book of the year arrived late and with a resounding thud. It was the Collected Poems of Ken Smith, published by Bloodaxe (he was its first poet over thirty [40] years ago) and a veritable door-stopper at almost 650 pages… He was always writing and lived to write. There are 632 poems in this lovingly edited and constructed volume. As a solid testament and memorial it is almost lapidary. But nothing for Kenneth John Smith was set in stone: it was modern, fluid, on the move, and he was always chasing it.’ – Nigel Jarret, The Lonely Crowd (Books of the Year 2018)
Read the feature here.
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
The Manchester Review, April 2019
An excellent in-depth review of Ken Smith’s Collected Poems went online in the April 2019 edition of The Manchester Review.
‘What we now have here is the collected poetry of a singular and driven voice. A poet who travelled widely both literally and imaginatively into some of the most difficult corners of the late twentieth century world; from Wormwood Scrubs prison, to the moors of his northern England, from Amish Pennsylvania to ‘a Sarajevo bread queue’. …. This book shows how hugely successful Smith was as a poet, and what a resource he provides for those writing in his wake.’ – Ian Pople, The Manchester Review
Stride, online Tuesday 11 December 2018
‘… what a book it is! There are more early poems to delight in, and it is clear that themes of history, London (and other cities) and East Europe appear and reappear throughout all his work… an impressive, accumulative set of poetry, that attempts and often succeeds in speaking about, to and for the dispossessed, the poor, the homeless, the downtrodden and the ignored; all of us. In early 21st century Britain, we need this poetry more than ever, to inform and incite us’ – Rupert Loydell, Stride Magazine, on Collected Poems
[16 November 2022]
