Jonty Tiplady

Zam Bonk Dip

Jonty Tiplady’s prizewinning first collection Zam Bonk Dip is a must read for anyone keeping up with contemporary poetry. Awarded the 2009 Crashaw Prize, this book brings together “At the School of Metaphysics” and many other sought after Tiplady chapbooks. Zam Bonk Dip is a heartfreakingly necessary read, bringing poetry right into the age of internet addiction and ecological comedown, taking its cues as much from Larkin, Beckett, Lispector and Derrida as from Facebook, 80s’ TV, Donny Darko and Popeye. This is also a deeply sexy book, dealing as it does with the surprising and funny side to our internet-touched sex lives. Tiplady’s poetry is a seriously popular and accessible blend, full of compulsive highs and lowbrow pleasures. Few books of poetry are as simultaneously funny and moving. Here ET rubs shoulders with Amy Winehouse, drowning polar bears sing, and the poet goes with his Mum to headbutt cacti. Here are not only the costs and exhilarations of our Googlised happiness, but the decline of America, a virtual phenomenolgy of pop music, a new type of literary tourette’s, the 20th century as it echoes in this, and some of the most explosively hilarious love poems ever written. Tiplady’s verse form transmutes and glissades as it needs to, becoming strikingly broken just as the heart telling it, and suitably dark as it takes in the still haunting vestiges of 9/11 (the jumbos and jumpers of the opening poem for example) and other worldwide seisms. The work of Tiplady has quite rightly been heralded as something fresh and important. Look no further for the essential poetry of the twenty first century.