K.M. Dersley's Management Gold Not Me (Book Review) JS Watts

K.M. Dersley's Management Gold Not Me
Reviewed by JS Watts

Management Gold Not Me, the latest chapbook from the Suffolk poet K.M. Dersley, is quoted as being a booklet that “takes no prisoners”. I would suggest that it does take prisoners, but is then happy to expose them to all the tricks listed in the CIA Bumper Annual of Water Boarding and Other Fun Techniques. I mean that in a positive way, unless, of course, you happen to be on the receiving end of the sarcasm, jibes and wit that flow through this small publication.

K.M. Dersley is without fear and enthusiastically takes on all comers in the form of management think and speak, poetry small presses, the world of work and his own misspent youth.

In the poem Going His Own Gait, one butt of the joke is the world of management “blue sky thinking” with its courses which,

“we hear
had people climbing trees. literally.

they scratched themselves like monkeys
to please a supervisor.”

Elsewhere, in poems such as “That Baffling Repute”, “Did They Actually Pay Any Rent?” and “The Importance of Ronald Garvey”, poetry itself takes a bit of a pasting with references to poems that,

“are daunting.

they rumble on
as if he’s got some obscure
grudge against the world
(though it’s hard
to say what they are really
about at all).”

Poetry magazine editors, though hopefully only specific ones, also come in for some flack on the grounds that they,

“have long been perpetrating the atrocities
of a number of boring twats
without much encouragement.”

The Derz, as K.M. Dersley is sometimes known, is in full spate in this brief, but bitter, selection of poems. Just keep your fingers crossed that you’re never on the receiving end.

Management Gold Not Me by K.M. Dersley is published by Propaganda Press

Author bio:

Cats and Other Myths, the debut poetry collection by J.S.Watts, is published by Lapwing Publications. It is 88 pages of poetry that finds contemporary relevance in the echoes of myth and legend and the mythic in the day to day world around us. Her website is: JS Watts.