There is a deliberately overexposed quality to Cecilia Knapp’s poems: they take place in troubled light. Bright yet bleak, they hold the attention. She belongs loosely within a Kae Tempest, Hollie McNish, tell-it-like-it-is, streetwise (or, where necessary, street-foolish) school of poetry. She was young people’s laureate for London between 2020 and 2021 and this collection, her debut, begins in a brazenly anti-poetic way, as un-self-servingly revealing as the sudden emptying of a handbag. I Used to Eat KFC Zingers Without Hating Myself opens with a line straining not to become a poem: “Order cat litter off Amazon.” And what follows is an intriguingly miscellaneous decanting of her mind:
I use emojis
to avoid conflict. Worry I’m a gentrifier.
Knapp is not a gentrifier: she does not primp or preen and she is inclusively truthful. Her tone, at times, is reminiscent of the unprecious novelist Nina Stibbe, although Knapp’s sense of absurdity is less dependable.
In My Mother Quit Bread, she writes:
When Dad left Mum, Mum cited
not enough bonking
The woman he left her for wore
linen shirts.
The shirts are very Stibbe.
Knapp writes with a light touch even when her heart is heaviest: her mother died when she was seven and her alcoholic brother also died too young. The collection comes into its own in loving and painful poems about him. Portrait of My Brother as Cindy Crawford is particularly disarming, remembering his flamboyance. All is well until the last line’s doom-laden flourish:
all our mum’s scarves
around your throat.”
Melancholy poetry can be, as Stevie Smith observed, perversely cheering. But this poetry more often brings on a flustered alarm. Some Older Dude, about losing her virginity to an unnamed man in a van, recalls a schoolgirl bravado. “No honestly it was good,” she tells a friend, as she perfectly recreates the secondary school vibe in “south block loos” where tales once got told. Over and over, in Knapp’s narratives, knowing something is wrong does not stop it happening. This is quirkily explored in You Know a Market Where the Tulips Are Still Three Quid, which ends with a fruit-seller preposterously weighing avocados. She knows she is being short-changed and does nothing (writing the poems is what she does). It is men, if her mother and grandmother are to be believed, who are the problem. Her grandmother predicts: “men will calm down in the end”.
The poems are full of capitulations and compulsions – dieting is one way of doing something. “I’m dieting again, sipping low-cal miso/on a moving train,” she writes in All My Ex-Boyfriends Are Having a Dinner Party. It ends:
I see people eating crisps in public
on a Monday
like they have no guilt.
Bread and crisps are the staples in this poetry – with pizza and peaches (not all in good nick) thrown in. A poem about her mother’s last days in the hospice, LOROS, includes this ironically forlorn thought:
The next day, when the doctor said she needed
to eat more, she laughed,
told him she had waited forever to be
this thin.
Knapp revels in non sequitur yet excels when something throwaway unexpectedly collides with her emotional narrative. In I Hope You Stopped for the Swans, she is texting her father and thinking about her dead brother and goes on to remember, almost randomly, how they used to ask their dad to “bury us in the sand”. In context, the line makes you catch your breath. In the acknowledgments, she says writing “saved” her and the evidence is here: this tormented collection has a saving grace.
Peach Pig by Cecilia Knapp is published by Corsair (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
on good days my brother
Tis smiling
there’s no bottle
no thick night phone call
as he looks down
at a city
from a balcony
thinking about flying
a hot spoon
in his hand
the shadows
he left on the stairs
have gone
like smoke
he is dancing
into the widest summer
in a long red dress
