Kate Arnold - ‘Kicking at Tombstones’

Kate Arnold processes the world through writing lyrics and poetry. She is  the vocal half of the band 'Dead Anyway' and this is her debut collection of poetry.

Availiable from, https://deadanyway.bandcamp.com along with all Dead Anyway recordings and merchandise.

Also availiable worldwide from Amazon, or your usual bookseller, where stocked or by order.

Dead Anyway

 Vocals:   Kate Arnold - Music:    Marc Symonds

deadanyway.co.uk

These ‘poems that are also songs’ form a new(ish) genre… ‘grumpy lyricism’… I might call them Larkin-esque… or like …Auden, perhaps. Wilde, perhaps. But these are songs too; so perhaps Mark E. Smith or certain songs by Joni Mitchell. Arnold announces… ‘there is something wrong with me/I am intravenously off key’ it’s a kind of mission statement for the entire collection.  They are poems of exhaustion and fury… explicit and allusive, angry with the online banalities of the contemporary world.

Martin Randall - Senior Lecturer Creative Arts University of Gloucestershire

Reading these always makes one think. Later—often days later—a line or two will center itself in one’s consciousness and click with a different meaning, or click with a meaning that changes the entire text. And weeks later, that same line may return and shift one's perspective yet again. A rewarding collection which demands repeated explorations.

Ted Leibowitz – BAGeL Radio

Verbal splendour sets certain lyricists apart… drawing you closer to their work… It isn’t so much what does this mean, as how has this happened? Now, Arnold may well be communicating in code to resistance groups. It is social commentary; the modern world placed under a microscope… All of life is here. These words, pulled from the compost of a furtive, bubbling mind, are flowers with fists.

Mick Mercer - http://www.mickmercer.com

Kate Arnold

Kate Arnold is a MA Creative and Critical Writing student at the University of Gloucestershire. She was tutored by poets Carol Ann Duffy and John Harvey at The Arvon Foundation’s Unpublished Writer’s residential course in 1987, and her poetry has appeared in Slowdancer and Aurora magazines.

Kate also writes prose and drama; her short story The Magnets was included in the London Independent Story Prize anthology in 2023, and an excerpt of her play The Good Piano was performed at The Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham’s New Writing Showcase.

     This is her first published poetry collection.