Poetry review – SKY SAILING: Marie-Louise Eyres finds that a surrealist element in Tony Kitt’s poetry doesn’t hinder its ability to connect with a world his readers can recognize
Sky Sailing
Tony Kitt
Salmon Poetry
ISBN 978-1-915022-95-0
pp. 120 €14
Tony Kitt’s second full collection of poetry, Sky Sailing, builds on his already well-established surrealist style, as explored in Endurable Infinity, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) his chapbook, The Magic Phlute, (Survision, 2019) as well as his many appearances in international poetry magazines including Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, The Prague Revue and elsewhere.
The singular beauty of this new collection, as I find it, is that his adherence to the style of surrealist poetry serves as a function of inclusivity. Rather than pushing the reader away with any kind of obscurity, he completely draws the reader in with the eerie, the startlingly unexpected, and also on an emotional level, the strangely familiar.
From the universality of the first section to the more despair-focused second section, which touches on both recent events in Ukraine as well as a sense of personal worthlessness, Kitt is not bashing you over the head with political rhetoric, but his intention, his stance, informs the very consistent voice that runs throughout the book, right through to the experimental and fragmentary pieces, that appear at the end.
There is a fearless playfulness in every poem, which is counterbalanced by an acute knowledge of the precarious nature of life, the sense of proximity with which one can live to the edge of despair. Such despair is most prevalent in some of the shorter poems, like “De cavea”:
The postulate: You eat
what you’ve thought up
The counter-postulate: you
can be eaten.
It also appears in the first and last lines of “A Flood after the Flood (2)” which are, respectively, ‘Blood welcomes the flood’ and ‘This is how the body talks/ of its end.’ And we find it again, most devastatingly, in “Final Solution” where the darkness, curs and strays howl at night and ultimately, in ungarnished terms, ‘…you feel like you don’t want to be/ on this planet anymore’.
In the poem, “Judas”, there’s a startling opening image of the man as giant, as almost an entire solar system:
Slurps the blue-sky jelly.
Crickets chirr in his beard;
a little ugly planet swells inside him.
Judas is embodied as a jelly slurper, a man with essentially a forest for a beard, who is made from a single rib ‘the world’s broken rib’, just as Eve was made in the Garden of Eden from one rib out of Adam. So, with this Judas we have an equal to Eve, each considered some of the worst betrayers of Christianity within the context of the Bible. And yet he lives, both outside in the known world and I believe possibly, deep within our own selves, as well.
In “The Current Balance”, the soul of the nation is manifested as ‘a lemon’ – a broken thing, a dud, a joke, a sour piece of corrosive fruit no less. This metaphor is fully explored here in visceral, both biological and industrial terms, as in ‘boneless cathedrals disgorge cycles, statues’ marble veins’ and the reference to ‘the oily steel of time’. But within the context of this poem, we are not encouraged to give up. Instead Kitt’s tone encourages the reader to share in a wise and wry understanding of just how things are.
There are many other poems in this new collection, which engender an underlying sense of inclusivity through the surrealist lens. In the poem, “Involuntary Sculpture”, exploration of the subject of mutual admiration and personal comparison leads to the lines
The shuffling of your thoughts
makes my lung butterfly fold
This is utterly original, yet immediately recognizable as a universal, physical-emotional response. And I can’t imagine many readers unable to connect with the sense of personal enlightenment in the opening lines of the third section’s first poem, “Leeway”:
What were we before music was born
inside us? I remember silence spilling
from every jar.
The impact of poems such as these, is not only delight but also a sense that the collection as a whole feels like a prolific and impassioned outpouring and that there is likely so much more to come, ready to spill onto the page. Indeed I really hope that is the case. Readers will not find even a spare ounce of self-indulgence in these poems; there is absolutely zero navel-gazing (regardless of how popular that is as a trope in the current world of poetry publishing). Instead, there is a boldly honest and imaginative rendering of the world, which is firmly underpinned by a deep understanding of politics, art, history, philosophy and of course, human frailty.
Marie-Louise Eyres is an Anglo-American poet now living in Bristol UK, where she is Rep for the Poetry Society’s North Bristol Stanza Group. Her previous poetry review appeared in 2019 online in the literary magazine The Blue Nib
Apr 7 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Tony Kitt
Poetry review – SKY SAILING: Marie-Louise Eyres finds that a surrealist element in Tony Kitt’s poetry doesn’t hinder its ability to connect with a world his readers can recognize
Sky Sailing
Tony Kitt
Salmon Poetry
ISBN 978-1-915022-95-0
pp. 120 €14
Tony Kitt’s second full collection of poetry, Sky Sailing, builds on his already well-established surrealist style, as explored in Endurable Infinity, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) his chapbook, The Magic Phlute, (Survision, 2019) as well as his many appearances in international poetry magazines including Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, The Prague Revue and elsewhere.
The singular beauty of this new collection, as I find it, is that his adherence to the style of surrealist poetry serves as a function of inclusivity. Rather than pushing the reader away with any kind of obscurity, he completely draws the reader in with the eerie, the startlingly unexpected, and also on an emotional level, the strangely familiar.
From the universality of the first section to the more despair-focused second section, which touches on both recent events in Ukraine as well as a sense of personal worthlessness, Kitt is not bashing you over the head with political rhetoric, but his intention, his stance, informs the very consistent voice that runs throughout the book, right through to the experimental and fragmentary pieces, that appear at the end.
There is a fearless playfulness in every poem, which is counterbalanced by an acute knowledge of the precarious nature of life, the sense of proximity with which one can live to the edge of despair. Such despair is most prevalent in some of the shorter poems, like “De cavea”:
The postulate: You eat
what you’ve thought up
The counter-postulate: you
can be eaten.
It also appears in the first and last lines of “A Flood after the Flood (2)” which are, respectively, ‘Blood welcomes the flood’ and ‘This is how the body talks/ of its end.’ And we find it again, most devastatingly, in “Final Solution” where the darkness, curs and strays howl at night and ultimately, in ungarnished terms, ‘…you feel like you don’t want to be/ on this planet anymore’.
In the poem, “Judas”, there’s a startling opening image of the man as giant, as almost an entire solar system:
Slurps the blue-sky jelly.
Crickets chirr in his beard;
a little ugly planet swells inside him.
Judas is embodied as a jelly slurper, a man with essentially a forest for a beard, who is made from a single rib ‘the world’s broken rib’, just as Eve was made in the Garden of Eden from one rib out of Adam. So, with this Judas we have an equal to Eve, each considered some of the worst betrayers of Christianity within the context of the Bible. And yet he lives, both outside in the known world and I believe possibly, deep within our own selves, as well.
In “The Current Balance”, the soul of the nation is manifested as ‘a lemon’ – a broken thing, a dud, a joke, a sour piece of corrosive fruit no less. This metaphor is fully explored here in visceral, both biological and industrial terms, as in ‘boneless cathedrals disgorge cycles, statues’ marble veins’ and the reference to ‘the oily steel of time’. But within the context of this poem, we are not encouraged to give up. Instead Kitt’s tone encourages the reader to share in a wise and wry understanding of just how things are.
There are many other poems in this new collection, which engender an underlying sense of inclusivity through the surrealist lens. In the poem, “Involuntary Sculpture”, exploration of the subject of mutual admiration and personal comparison leads to the lines
The shuffling of your thoughts
makes my lung butterfly fold
This is utterly original, yet immediately recognizable as a universal, physical-emotional response. And I can’t imagine many readers unable to connect with the sense of personal enlightenment in the opening lines of the third section’s first poem, “Leeway”:
What were we before music was born
inside us? I remember silence spilling
from every jar.
The impact of poems such as these, is not only delight but also a sense that the collection as a whole feels like a prolific and impassioned outpouring and that there is likely so much more to come, ready to spill onto the page. Indeed I really hope that is the case. Readers will not find even a spare ounce of self-indulgence in these poems; there is absolutely zero navel-gazing (regardless of how popular that is as a trope in the current world of poetry publishing). Instead, there is a boldly honest and imaginative rendering of the world, which is firmly underpinned by a deep understanding of politics, art, history, philosophy and of course, human frailty.
Marie-Louise Eyres is an Anglo-American poet now living in Bristol UK, where she is Rep for the Poetry Society’s North Bristol Stanza Group. Her previous poetry review appeared in 2019 online in the literary magazine The Blue Nib