Closure (28 page)

ALSO FROM INSCRIBE/PEEPAL TREE

RED

Edited by Kwame Dawes

ISBN: 9781845231293; pp. 252; pub. 2010; price: £9.99

“Perhaps the most significant thing to be said about
Red
is that the poets in this volume burst through any constraining label with writing that throbs and pulses and seeps and flows.”

— Margaret Busby

Featuring:

John Agard, Patience Agbabi, Maya Chowdhry, Fred D'Aguiar, Bernardine Evaristo, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Roi Kwabena, John Lyons, Jack Mapanje, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Grace Nichols, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Lemn Sissay, Dorothea Smartt, Gemma Weekes, Wangui Wa Goro and many more…

Red
collects poems that engage “red”, poems by Black British poets writing with the word “red” in mind – as a kind of leap-off point, a context, a germ – the way something small, minor, or grand might spur a poem. It offers the reader the freedom to come to whatever conclusions they want to about what writing as a poet who is also Black and British might mean.

The result is a book of poets ranging from well-established and published writers to first-time published poets.
Red
does find its usual associations with blood, violence, passion, and anger. Sometimes it is linked with sensuality and sexuality. But there are surprises, when red defines a memory or mood, the quality of light in a sky, the colour of skin, the sound of a song, and much, much more. The anthology, therefore, succeeds in producing poems that seem to be first about image, and only then about whatever else fascinates the poet.

In this sense,
Red
is a different kind of anthology of Black British writing, and the richness of the entries, the moods, the humour, the passion, the reflection, the confessional all confirm that Black British poetry is a lively and defining force in Britain today.

____________________

Find over 300 Caribbean and Black British titles on
www.peepaltreepress.com