Author: Stephen Collis Publisher: Pamenar Press (2025) Knock Down House incorporates memoir, cultural and literary studies, and poetry to explore the processes of colonisation, war, environmental over-shoot and migration that have shaped, and been shaped by, modernity. Taking as its instigation the moment the author’s grandfather, a British aviator in the Great War, was given a copy of Kipling’s poems as he set off to do the Empire’s dirty work, Knock Down House is a work of historical recovery and poetic imagination. In something of a Sebaldian method, Collis visits sites significant to his grandfather’s war experience, records dreams, joins an annual walk with refugees and asylum seekers, explores works of art from Tiepolo to John Akomfrah, and ponders the oceans that separate present from past, and self from other.
