Kicking at Tombstones by Kate Arnold
Kicking at Tombstones by Kate Arnold
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.
Dead Anyway:- Vocals: Kate Arnold - Music: Marc Symonds
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