Round About Town
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Kevin Boniface
“I see the waxwings again. This time they are in the tree by the flats where the skinny Asian man with the grey jeans and studded belt is trying to gain access by shouting Raymond.”
—Sunday, 23 January 2011
ISBN 978 1 910010 18 1
128pp, 234 x 142
paperback with flaps
First published 2018
Reprinted 2019
£12.00
Not available at present.
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Reviews and articles
“Round About Town is a work that can conjure fury at poverty, contempt for the poverty of mainstream popular culture and joy at its moments of poetic collapse.”
Mythogeography
“I find scratching beneath the surface of the ordinary endlessly fascinating.”
‘The way I work’, Big Issue North
“There’s no story here, in this whole book, but there are glimpses of hundreds of stories.
It is funny, and unsettling, and comforting, often at the same time, and you don’t get to find out what happens next.”
Anna Wood, Caught by the River
“Absurdity lurks around every corner.”
Michael Caines in The Times Literary Supplement,
9 November 2018
“The funniest book I read this year was the one-man mass-observation of Round About Town by Kevin Boniface, a Yorkshire postman with a poet’s eye.”
Jeremy Noel-Tod, ‘Books of the Year 2018’ The Times Literary Supplement
“Instead of being fixed in a frame like a painting, Huddersfield becomes a fluid entity as a series of images, vignettes, incidents and glimpsed lives flow through every page, endlessly unfolding… The book takes everything as it comes. There is no hierarchy of objects or a sense that certain objects and entities are more picturesque or culturally valid than others.”
Gareth E. Rees, ‘Absurdities and Synchronicities: A Postman’s View of the Everyday’ Unofficial Britain
“If Alan Bennett were a postman, his diaries might read very much like this. (And they wouldn’t have all that boring stuff in them about the theatre.)”
Richard Carter, ‘Diary of a postman’
For the last eight years Kevin Boniface has been writing succinct descriptions of events and incidents that have taken place whilst out and about on his postal round, his daily route taking him from the main sorting office to the streets and outlying neighbourhoods above the town. In these commentaries and records nothing seems to be typical—engaged and disconnected conversations, the
observed and the overheard—the everyday activity of life on the move.
With 58 black and white photographs.
Advance Information
“There are sandstone streets, specifics of litter, non-sequitur asides from path-crossing neighbours and details, details, sharp and alive. But make no mistake, this is not dour, northern observational humour, this is crisp packet peacocks, the full dynamic range of flora and fauna of an ecosystem both urban and rural elevated to art in the fluttering uncertainty of an eye-blink. This is Rorschach Yorkshire. This is how questions are asked and identity is formed through what you see, through what you hear and what you write. Is this how you find yourself? Or how you lose yourself?”
Lee Ashworth, Louder Than War
Kevin Boniface is an artist based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. After graduating in art and geography in 1993, he joined the Royal Mail as a postman which has influenced his artwork ever since. Over many years, he has also produced zines, exhibitions, artists’ books, short films, audio recordings and live performances. His previous publications include Where Are You? (2005) and Lost in the Post (2008).
kevinboniface.co.uk