'Joyful with the feel of life'

No Time, Kieron Winn  (Howtown Press; 2025; Hardback, ISBN 978-1-0683346-0-3)

Kieron Winn’s first collection of poems for a decade, following on from The Mortal Man, is well worth the wait. He is able to transform everyday commonplaces, and, to paraphrase the poet Alexander Pope, what has ‘oft been thought and said’ into dazzling and memorable verse. Winn has a gift for metaphor, thus a petrol-powered lawn mower in Saturday Afternoon becomes a ‘dancing Dalek’ as it ‘chuckled and roared’, negotiating an ‘acre of orchard’ with its ‘lumbering manoeuvres /Around the apple trees’. This gift is underpinned by Winn’s mastery of form, from sonnets and quatrains down to this couplet, a complete poem entitled The Still Point: ‘Some call this dancing stillness God: they place/ Stained glass on top of shiny empty space’. A poem as beautifully controlled (the poise of the line ending and the seeming inevitability of the full rhyme of ‘place’ and ‘space’) as it is unfathomably moving and thought-provoking.

It is no surprise that Winn’s collection starts out with local particularity (West Kent Youth Theatre Party) and ends in outer space with Voyager 1, a poem that ponders not only the epic voyage of something well-made but also the fate of humankind: ‘In 40,000 years,/ This craft, perhaps the final artefact, / Secluded, unimaginably far,/ Will be halfway towards the nearest star.’ Winn’s literary learning is demonstrated with arch parody and quiet allusive nods. The former most notably in ‘versions’ of W. B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium in the voices of A. E. Housman, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin. Here learning informs every comic move. The latter in reckonings that take the reader from Wordsworth via an ekphrastic response to Rembrandt through to The Beatles’ final rooftop concert. If all this sounds a little over-powering, then be assured, it is not. Winn’s light touch allows poignancy and ironic chuckles of recognition in equal measure.

I walk through the grounds of Blenheim Palace most weeks. It took Winn’s audacious half rhyme (‘that soaring phallus…his famous draughty palace’) to make me ponder anew the statue of the first Duke of Marlborough.

This is marvellous stuff.

Peter Carpenter
(CR 92-21)

(Biographical note: Head of English in 1992 when Kieron Winn taught at Tonbridge School; author of seven collections of poetry; reviewer for many learned journals including The London Magazine, PN Review and Agenda.)