T.L. Morrisey

Monday, September 4, 2017

The Shrouding by Leo Kennedy

I just finished reading Leo Kennedy's The Shrouding, originally published in 1933, this edition was re-published by Michael Gnarowski's Golden Dog Press in 1975. I am so impressed by Kennedy's work, I think he's brilliant and he's the real thing, a real poet. He always presented himself as a poet and I thought this rather specious when reading Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy, but I can see the validity of it now. This one book is Kennedy's (almost entire) body of work, as Leon Edel writes in his Introduction, "...all writers in reality have only one book within them." This may be true, or not true, but we would still have liked a few more books by the same person. Kennedy is a formalist in his writing, there is rhythm and music in his poems, many of the poems are unfashionable as they rhyme, and the first poem in the book is a sonnet. Kennedy writes in his Introduction, "These poems were written when the world was more formal and poets thought a lot about scansion and almost as much about rhyme." I bought my copy of The Shrouding from Dundurn Press, delivered it cost $13.80, cheap! https://www.dundurn.com/books/Shrouding