witness

This book is the second poetry collection by Jonathan Kinsman [this being the first], who's a personal inspiration to me and an all-round fantastic bean. The fourteen* poems herein exploratively reimagine the personalities of Jesus of Nazareth[who!?]'s disciples, with all of their quirks, flaws and background-complications - as 21st-century persons.
   I'd read or at least heard many of them before but upon receiving my copy of the book in the post I took the opportunity to read it all out again, aloud, in the park, as it was a nice day, though on reflection I'll think twice about doing something like that again as I had to interact with a gaggle of strangers who were looking for a lost football in a bush while I was fully teared-up from the sheer emotive power of some of the poems in this volume. This is a righteous angry book, of radical love and hope, of seeing depths of injustice and hypocrisy latent in the world and knowing that if Christ came again today we would crucify him again; and his followers, for all their pain and self-tormented inner conflict, would probably let the authorities do so. I think most "orthodox" Christian readers would find elements of these poems grating, because they are challenging - they ask the hard questions, remind us of the fundamentals of Jesus's mission, redraw familiar boundaries into stories that feel so strangely familiar and eerily echoant of contemporary reality - I'm rambling.
   This book is excellent and I'd recommend it to all discerning poetry-lovers with the knowing caveats that if you're a Christian it will make you think some uncomfortable things but lead you deeper into Christ - and if you're not - well, it could be an even more dangerous book.

* The twelve originals, plus Mary Magdelene, and Matthias - who in Acts is chosen by lot to replace Judas.

&

This book is the debut pamphlet of poetries by Jonathan Kinsman (who as well as being founding editor of the cracking journal Riggwelter Press runs the Gorilla Poetry spoken word events I've been frequenting), which is literally so good it won the Indigo Dreams prize for poetry pamphlets. I don't know how they judge these things or what & was up against but to me it seems like it probably deserved to win whatever the case.

   & is a collection in which poetic language use is pushed to its fullest, drawing out huge emotional sprawlings; where the connectivities of selfs, others, words, objects, feelings, actions, and the intangible moments of choice and uncertainty which peg all these components of reality together are pinpointed with a deftness of phrase that would be uncanny if you noticed it (which you do upon re-reading, such is the craftspersonship), which you might well not because the headspace these poems pull you into, with an at once intimate and yet detached immediacy, is deliberately kept fluid - you follow trains of thought and narrative which sometimes meander gently, sometimes twist sharp corners and skid off toward a previously-unseen horizon, always providing an exactly right space in which the poems unfold in their self-contained entireties. As such it's the longer ones which I would pick as favourites if I were in the habit of doing this (which regular readers will maybe know I'm not); iterations of self and it's like this are just superbly subtle and poignant as they go on, recursively exploring an amount of conceptual nooks and crannies to a poetic subject which you probably couldn't come up with yourself in a solid hour of coffee-fuelled brainstorming, and here Kinsman neatly encapsulates all these variegations and ruminations in (one would think) impossibly concise and breathtakingly potent nuggets of verse.

   It goes without saying I enjoyed this pamphlet a lot. If you want an introduction to perhaps one of Manchester's most interesting new up-and-coming poets, look no further.