Writing King Kong explores the way we write the world, and reinvent it both for our own development and delusion. From an elliptical self-help manual to a telephone party line where we become ‘an accidental spy’ on another life, from the ambivalent comfort of a drunken night singing hymns to the elusive proximity of family trees, the recipe for summer pudding as elegy for a lost friend or a mantra of engineering facts (‘six million hand-driven rivets’) about Sydney Harbour Bridge to comfort a dying father.  Along with King Kong, Anton Chekhov, Marilyn Monroe and Shakespeare’s comic lovers, the likes of Gershwin, Robinson Crusoe, Ulysses, Fred and Ginger also find their way into this eclectic, multi-voiced collection.  At the heart of the book is a sequence of poems inspired by the writer’s travels in South America, conjuring both the exactitude of place and the strange unreality of journeying.

"His poems can remind us how complex a business it is to recall and rebuild a world, and how the act of doing so comes bundled with its own sense of loss" - Paul Farley, Poetry London
 

Listen to Robert Seatter read his poem, ‘Goodbye’: