Sean Bonney


Sean Noel Bonney was an English poet born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He lived in London and, from 2015 up until the time of his death, in Berlin. He was married to the poet Frances Kruk. Charles Bernstein published poet William Rowe's obituary for Bonney in US online magazine Jacket2 Detailed notes to Bonney's poetics by nom-de-plume 'Prolapsarian' is published on Tumblr.
His publications include Blade Pitch Control Unit, Baudelaire in English, Document, The Commons, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud, Letters Against the Firmament, and Our Death.

Life and work

Together with other UK-based poets, Bonney's work marks a progression and continuance of the British Poetry Revival, combining with his abiding interest in left-wing radical movements such as British punk, the Angry Brigade, the Red Army Faktion, the American Black Power movement, Surrealism and revolutionary art in general. Living at various points in Hackney, Hastings and Walthamstow, he was a regular attendee at the Bob Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop, co-founding the reading series Xing the Line with Jeff Hilson, and co-editing the press Yt Communication with Frances Kruk. A sequence of 14 line poems, The Commons, originally subtitled "A Narrative / Diagram of the Class Struggle' combined contemporary uprisings with the voices of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the english Civil War and "the cracked melodies of ancient folk songs".
Following the completion of his PhD, from 2015 to 2019 Bonney was a postdoctoral researcher at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, conducting a project examining the work of Diane di Prima.
Bonney died in a tragic accident on 13 November 2019 in Berlin.

Books