Ed Simon at Poetry Magazine:
As is apparent, Bonney’s work is not purely aesthetic or for its own sake; it’s not romantic or confessional in the sense of the personal divorced from the political, if such a thing is even possible. That’s not to suggest that his work is simple or accessible. In keeping with the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s, in which poets rejected the prevailing conservatism of British literature, Bonney’s work is difficult, transgressive, subversive, and at times hermetic. “Don’t get me wrong,” Bonney writes in “Letter Against the Language,” “I’m not about to disappear into some kind of curate Cloud of Unknowing, or worse, some comfortably opaque experimental poetry. I mean, fuck that shit.” Our Death bears the imprints of such avant-garde movements as sound poetry, concrete poetry, visual poetry, and performance art. As a working-class boy from Brighton, Bonney was steadfastly leftist in his verse, though, as he noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Grunthaner in BOMB, “I hate mainstream left wing artists. I don’t consider my work to be protest work. I’m not trying to convince anybody to not like capitalism. My ideal audience already hates cops.” Some of the best prophets aren’t there to make you do stuff; they exist to bear witness.
more here.