KATHLEEN KENNY was brought up in a Tyneside family where her father and her brother didn’t speak to each other. She calls this rift “the knife”:

No-one sees it. No one talks of it.

Knife

is not mentioned, but slices our house.

Revolving mostly around her family in the West End of Newcastle in her formative years, the collection is seen as mirroring the notorious destruction of communities in the Sixties.

But Kathleen’s ghastly home situation makes the deepest mark – truly a knife. The dedication page includes a snatch of conversation: “Did you see Da while you were out?” “We passed.” Entitled Afterword, Kathleen’s final poem reads:

In a sense, what our Pauline says is right:

For his eight remaining years

Dad lived a ghost life.

They both died together

on the same lonely night:

The night our Jimmy took his own life.

Kathleen Kenny is to be congratulated on confronting this devastating aspect of her early life and transforming it into deeply-moving, if unsettling, verse. Hopefully this will have been a healing for herself. Anyway, it’s magnificent.