Blade Pitch Control Unit

by Sean Bonney

Blade Pitch Control Unit gathers together Sean Bonney's work of the past five years. Bonney combines formal experiment with a sarcastic voice rooted in punk to provide an original account of London's threatened psychogeography. His first major collection, the book suggests new possibilities for political poetry and its relationship to the urban environment.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The avant-garde in British poetry has never flourished. The Little England cultural mentality as espoused by Phillip Larkin and continued by the likes of Simon Armitage was resistant to the more cosmopolitan influences from America and Europe. Hence Jeremy Prynne and the magazine Quid seem to be the avant-garde's biggest proponents in the UK. The late Sean Bonney added a militant stance to this minority tendency. His rhetoric and verbal dissonance would seem to emulate Amiri Baraka, with its collaging akin to Prynne. Language itself, Bonney proposes, is inherently conservative. Thus the mission is to break up this inherent servitude. Much of this work makes far more sense when read aloud when its percussive fury breaks forth. The setting is London as surveillance state (fact: there are more surveillance cameras posted in the UK than almost anywhere in Europe).