Happyland by Kevin Connolly - Poetry Book

Romance, mortality, and teenage rebellion. Happyland, Kevin Connolly's eagerly anticipated second poetry collection, offers a fresh, contemporary approach to two age-old poetic preoccupations — love and loss. In tumbling, energetic lines and vivid, visual language, these poems explore the shadows of the old century before training their hopeful but apprehensive attention on the momentum of the new. Connolly fears neither eccentric humour nor high seriousness, and Happyland strikes with a sometimes whimsical, sometimes gritty flood of personal, cultural, and social spectacles: sunken submarines, unruly students, ecological woes, eccentric artists, and surreal imagery.... In Happyland, even our transparent, trivial entertainments (like politics and poetry) push us deeper into the semaphore of history. Like it or not, we're all players, the game is set, and it always comes down to the same poignant business of sorting the lost from the rescued. There's no sitting out a round — either we choose the world, or it chooses us: "It's midnight on the moon, stars / mutter their familiar cautions, / the leaves misread the cue cards, / strange words wander the freeway like mice." "This is poetry contra poetry, a largesse of language about diminishing returns. Connolly's work sells you a ticket for the stand-up act and leaves you in your seat for the ultimate finale." — Michael Redhill