Katerina Vaughan Fretwell : P.S., by Penn Kemp and Sharon Thesen

P.S., Penn Kemp and Sharon Thesen
Gap Riot Press, 2022

 

 

 

          The elegant lilac coloured cover of P.S. featuring two crows, symbolic messengers, encapsulates the poetic collaboration between Kemp and Thesen, each writing a poem for each month of a year. The title P.S. suggests an urgent postscript in a letter, cunningly illustrating the important themes the poets address: extreme weather, climate change, aging, pandemic, discrimination, the creative poetic process.

          Thesen opens with an elegiac bang on aging: “We die in our footsteps” from “Elegy For The Forecast, for Penn” and offers Penn: “ [...] a red cord to bind us [...] that would / anyway fray.” Kemp expands upon Thesen's poetic invitation in “Converse, for Sharon, January”: “your red cord [...] yes it frays but by then / it's a direct line inside the heart cave”, playing on aging and poetic lines, and then invokes the Celtic “Bridget spreads wide her crimson cloak” reiterating Thesen's multi-layered red image. Kemp writes in “Notes On The Text” that the two friends celebrate, challenge and validate each other’s poems.

          Diane di Prima, Circe, Imbolc, sleepy pears, smoke, an old man's dog ... populate and enliven the poems, bristling with brilliant imagery, passion and dynamic commingling. As an example, Thesen employs natural images, both figurative and literal, to capture the dreadful firestorms of summer in “Penn Poem For July”: “[...] and an orange sun / sank and no sun at all was to be seen [in daytime].”

Kemp responds in “Studies in Extreme”: a summer of fire versus water [...] unless we act on working solutions / now. Climate change changes us.”

          These few examples are just a taste of the elegant, eloquent banquet that awaits the reader. All 24 poems are dense with imagery, allusions and intelligently impassioned takes on our various present-day crises. The wry, elegiac, humorous, compassionate tone of P.S. commands a deep immersion.

 

 

 

 

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell's ninth poetry book, and art, is We Are Malala, Inanna 2019; her eighth, Dancing on a Pin, Inanna 2015, was part of the Battle of the Bards, was longlisted for Lowther Prize and 5 of the poems placed Runner Up in subTerrain's Outsider Poetry Contest. Recent poems are in Love Lies Bleeding edited by George Elliott Clarke, Poets Response to Peril edited by Richard Sitoski and Penn Kemp, and Words Gathered Vol 3 edited by Vanessa Shields and Irene Moore Davis.