Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Animals on Leads

We entered the town and the first thing we saw
was a woman taking her ferret for a walk.
‘Nice day for it,’ I said significantly. The ferret
was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine

producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet.
And us, should we visit the town’s oldest church
with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs,
or should we ramble to the squinty, stony seafront, walled in

by white gin-palace-style hotels? Let’s let the twitchy ferret
be our compass needle, straining against its bonds,
the confident quadrupedal scamperer pulling its minder along
until she’s going north and south, finding nothing and God.

Erik Kennedy

‘Animals on Leads’ is perhaps not a typical Sick Power Trip poem. It doesn’t lean into the collection’s preoccupations with things like illness and politics and war. It is explicitly not set in Aotearoa. And there is barely any glumness to it; it is almost chipper. But I like it a lot because I like poems that tell true stories, and I wish I had more of them. (The problem is that I don’t lead an interesting enough life to generate reams of fascinating ‘true story poems’.)The setting of the poem is Eastbourne, East Sussex. There are two solid clues as to the location. ‘The town’s oldest church / with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs’ is St Mary the Virgin, which is an absolutely stonking Grade I listed building. I lifted the language in that second line directly from the leaflet about the church’s architecture. And ‘the squinty, stony seafront, walled in // by white gin-palace-style hotels’ is a feature of Eastbourne more than any other South Coast resort town. I rate Eastbourne surprisingly highly. On looks it is at least an 8 out of 10. On culture it is becoming more like Brighton. The sea itself is pretty clean, which is a luxury in twenty-first-century England. And it has a wonderful collection of Eric Ravilious works at the Towner gallery.

And of course a third way we know the poem is not set here is the presence of a pet ferret. A ferret is an animal that certainly doesn’t belong in New Zealand, given that its great passion in life is eating birds and eggs. But in England, being walked on a lead, a ferret is a different proposition altogether. It stands for chaotic exuberance. The lines ‘The ferret / was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine // producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet’ have probably earned me more compliments for their deranged splendidness than any other lines I have ever written. Something in this image speaks to people.

It might be obvious to say this, but the ferret is not the only animal ‘on a lead’ in the poem. The owner of the ferret, dragged about according to her mad mustelid’s whims, is in my view also an animal on a lead. I mean, we all are, in one way or another. A lead always connects two animals, and the hierarchical relationship between them may not be what you would expect. I think there is some joy in the serendipitous meanderings of creatures without meaningful plans. Quite a lot of joy, in fact. When I said ‘Nice day for it’ to the woman in line 3 of the poem, I really meant it.

Erik Kennedy

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

From Poetry Shelf review:
“Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.” Full review here and reading by Erik here

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