We Brits

It has been just over a decade since the Independent hailed Karen McCarthy’s collection of contemporary black women’s poetry as “an anthology of tremendous depth” that showed “not just the vitality of the black British poetic voice but its standing in the context of writing from around the world.”

Since that celebrated publication, the UK poetry scene has continued to diversify, but, according to McCarthy, “UK-based talent is still under-represented on mainstream poetry lists, and a poet of color has yet to win the UK's most prestigious award, the T.S. Eliot Prize.”

The standing of the UK’s minority voices in the worldly context remains in flux. Continuing the work of her Bittersweet anthology, McCarthy has put together this A–Z hyperguide to UK poets of color as a timely reference for general readers, enthusiasts, and scholars, with the hopes that more established voices won’t be forgotten, and the emerging voices will be heard. The hyperguide not only lists these established and emerging names, but also includes links to websites, performance clips, MySpace pages, press interviews, reviews, and articles. It is intended as both a showcase and a resource that gives a sense of the communities and connections formed by poets of color and the issues that consume them.

—The Editors

Karen McCarthy's A-Z Hyperguide

A

John Agard is a seasoned subversive who grew up in Guyana and worked as a journalist there until moving to England in 1977. A prolific, award-winning writer, his work is rooted in the myth, landscape, politics, and storytelling tradition of the Caribbean—from calypso and cricket to Mangoes and Bullets (1985). In We Brits (2006), he turns his attention to reconstructing the iconography of the British establishment: Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed have a hard time at immigration; John Bull, Earl Grey and Morris dancing get a makeover; and Toussaint L’Ouverture pens a poem to Wordsworth.

Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered by a white English family, Patience Agbabi moved from the city to a small town when she was a teenager. This bicultural experience engendered, as she puts it, a “strong interest in borders and boundaries” and a “fascination with the point at which one thing transforms or translates to another.” Her latest collection, Bloodshot Monochrome (Canongate, 2008), confirms her own metamorphosis from a writer known principally as a performer whose work “draws on rap, jive and disco rhythms” (Daily Telegraph) to a “tour de force in neo-formalism” (Poetry Review). Her epistolary sonnet sequence “Problem Pages”—in which she dishes out advice to Shakespeare, Robert Frost, and June Jordan, among others—not only subverts the form but also provides a wry history of the writers and their relationship with the canon. Agbabi was the only black poet named as one of the 20 Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in 2004.

It takes a certain consistency to have had both your first (The Country at My Shoulder, 1993) and current (Europa, 2008) collections nominated for Britain’s most prestigious poetry award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Moniza Alvi has just this consistency. Born in Pakistan and raised in the English home counties, Alvi manages to be a number of contradictory things at one time: her work is subtle yet explosive, delicate yet probing, wildly imaginative yet coolly restrained. As the Guardian says, her poems “delight in their own quiet inventiveness and deftness of touch.” In Europa she explores trauma in all its guises—Europa is raped by Jupiter as a bull, a so-called “honor” killing is committed, wounds crouch low “among stalagmites and stalactites”—and the fissures between East and West play out on a canvas where “the world itself is veiled.” Bloodaxe published her collected works in Split World: Poems 1990–2005.

Apples & Snakes is a nonprofit organization that brings performance poets into schools, prisons, libraries, and theaters. Living up to its motto, “poetry with bite,” A & S has also produced a number of edgy one-person shows that fuse poetry and music with theatrical monologue by spoken-word artists such as Charlie Dark, who described his coming of age as a London DJ under the watchful eye of his Ghanaian mother in Have Box Will Travel; Zena Edwards, whose new show, Security, is a poetry-based play dealing with knife crime in London; and the clever and quirky Francesca Beard, whose Chinese Whispers explored her Malaysian-English heritage.

B

Also in the A & S stable is poet and theater practitioner Malika Booker. Her one-woman show, Unplanned, toured nationwide and delved deeply into female sexual psychology, featuring a teenage virgin pregnancy. Booker—who counts Sharon Olds, Martin Espada, and Lorna Goodison among her influences—has just published a new pamphlet, Breadfruit (mouthmark, 2008), and is working on a first collection that draws on her dual Grenadian and Guyanese background to articulate black women’s experiences and inheritance under slavery in a series of narrative poems. She travels extensively with the British Council, a cultural organization that tours British writers and artists in education and performance programs worldwide, and is a co-founder of the writers’ collective Malika’s Kitchen.

I first came across Jay Bernard’s work at Buckingham Palace, of all places, where she read alongside fellow young poet Kayo Chingonyi and Poet Laureate Andrew Motion as part of a day of poetry workshops for schoolchildren held in the splendor of the State Rooms. Bernard was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005, and her alluringly titled your sign is cuckoo, girl (2008) was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet selection.

The year 2007 was the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in Britain. A series of commemorative events were held at the British Museum, including a live satellite address from Nelson Mandela. A lesser mortal might have been overwhelmed by the magnitude of the occasion, but not the Jamaican dub poet and storyteller Jean “Binta” Breeze, whose rousing delivery of a specially commissioned poem had many in the thousand-strong audience close to tears. Her fifth book, The Fifth Figure (2006), is a dramatic monologue based on the structure of the Jamaican quadrille; it flits between poetry and prose as easily as its speaker slips in and out of patois. As Alexander Linklater writes in the Herald, “For stature [Breeze] invites a Caribbean comparison with Maya Angelou, except that her range is broader still.”

C

Manchester-based literature development organization and publisher Commonword, which releases poetry under its Crocus Books imprint, also operates under its umbrella Cultureword, a center for black creative writing established in 1986. The group organizes performances, workshops, residencies and events, and it has been active in developing Asian, African, Caribbean and Chinese poets in the UK. Anglo-Irish-Asian poet John Siddique was Commonword’s writer-in-residence in 2005, and he edited the workshop anthology Transparency as part of his tenure. His first collection, The Prize, came out in 2007. Check out his reading of Cheap Moisturiser from the Lifelines—Poets for Oxfam CD.

D

Guyanese-born writer and critic David Dabydeen’s first collection, Slave Song (1984), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. The author of four novels and the co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), Dabydeen saw his reputation as a poet further confirmed with the publication of Turner (2002)—a finely wrought long poem that responds to J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship, which depicted captured Africans thrown overboard in chains so the owners could claim the insurance. In 2007 Dabydeen received the Hind Rattan award for his contribution to the literary life of the Indian diaspora.

American readers will probably know Kwame Dawes as a prolific writer and professor of English at the University of South Carolina, but they may not know the extent of his influence and activity in Britain. I first read his work in 1994, when his debut, Progeny of Air, won the Forward Prize (the UK’s richest overall for poetry) for Best First Collection. In the same year the nonprofit literature organization Spread the Word (see “S”) brought him to London to run an intensive writers’ workshop called Afro Style School, which was so popular that it became an annual event. An essential link in the diaspora connecting Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean, Dawes is also the editor of Sweet Sop Books, a new poetry imprint of Peepal Tree Press (see “P”). His 11th collection, Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swap Country (2006), had its London premiere at Poetry International, the South Bank Centre’s biannual festival, in 2007.

E

Bernardine Evaristo is a poet and novelist. As a writer she is concerned with history—both social and personal—and with the process of revealing hidden histories through language that is evocative, witty, and energetic. Her first novel in verse, Lara (Angela Royal, 1997), was the forerunner to her critically acclaimed The Emperor’s Babe (Hamish Hamilton, 2001); both books subverted and stretched the long poem and the novel as literary genres. More experimental was Soul Tourists (Hamish Hamilton, 2005), a supernatural road novel that spliced prose, verse, and scripted dialogue with a host of ghostly cameos from black Europeans such as Alexander Pushkin. Blonde Roots (Hamish Hamilton, 2008), a novel that reverses the master-slave dynamic, is her first foray into straight prose, although she hasn’t abandoned poetry. In 2009 Bloodaxe will publish Lara: The Family Are Like Water, an updated edition that explores Evaristo’s Brazilian, Irish, and German bloodlines.

F

Bernadine Evaristo (file under “E”) is also an outspoken yet constructive critic of the establishment old guard, pointing out that fewer than 1 percent of those published in mainstream poetry presses are black/minority ethnic. In 2004 she was a judge of the Next Generation Poets, a Poetry Book Society promotion that showcased 20 poets who had published a first collection since 1994. To her dismay, the event revealed that in the previous ten years only a handful of poets of color had broken through into print. As a result, the Arts Council commissioned the Freeverse report, which canvassed poets, publishers, and editors on everything from earning a living to issues around stereotyping, quality, submissions, education, reviews, and the market.

Since then, Spread the Word has raised funds to run an intensive two-year mentoring program called The Complete Works. The program aims to provide a framework to help emerging poets produce new collections and refine their craft under the guidance of individually selected mentors and an industry-led steering committee. Evaristo, Faber and Faber’s poetry editor Matthew Hollis, and Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson are among those on its board, which in 2008 selected Rahwida Amin, Malika Booker, Janet Kofi-Tsekpo, Nick Makoha, Karen McCarthy, Mahfuz Mir, Shazea Quraishi, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, and Seni Seneviratne to be mentored.

G

While publication is the ultimate record of our contribution to the canon, A Great Day seeks to capture a different kind of moment in British literature for posterity. Inspired by “A Great Day in Harlem,” the 1958 photograph that featured many of the jazz greats of the 20th century posing on the steps of a New York brownstone, this tribute brought together 50 writers, editors, publishers, and poets of color at the British Library in September 2004. It was published in the Guardian and Independent newspapers.

The lineup comprised many of the great and the good, including Jackie Kay; the Jamaican-born James Berry; Ben Okri; Grace Nichols, whose latest collection is Startling the Flying Fish (2006); and the E.A. “Archie” Markham, who died suddenly in Paris last year. Born in 1939, Markham was a much-loved writer and academic who, in the words of Sean O’Brien, was “tireless in his resistance to orthodoxy, whether artistic, cultural or political.” His seventh collection, A Rough Climate (Anvil, 2002), saw him short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The book was typically international in its scope, focusing on the devastation wrought by the volcano in his native Montserrat and drawing on his life in England and Europe.

H

According to poet and translator George Szirtes, “Choman Hardi’s poems tell of tragedy, war, persecution and dispersal, but are far more than simple summonings of facts. The grace and rhythm of the telling— the singing of it—moves the poems beyond reportage.” He’s writing about Hardi’s excellent debut collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004), which draws on her childhood memories and experiences of exile from Kurdistan.

I

It is not without irony that Imtiaz Dharker refers to herself as a Scottish Muslim Calvinist who grew up in a Pakistani household in Glasgow and then eloped with a Hindu Indian to live between India and the UK. She is the author of four collections, the most recent being The terrorist at my table (2006). Simple yet multilayered, sensual and direct, hers is an intensely visual world where people “look like letters running away / from words I am struggling to understand” and “children’s voices are balloons released to open sky.” A documentary filmmaker and artist, she illustrates all of her own book jackets. She is included in Bloodaxe’s new DVD and anthology In Person: 30 Poets, which includes readings as well as interviews.

J

Born in Jamaica in 1952, Linton Kwesi Johnson is an activist, musician, and Grammy-nominated “don” of reggae poetry. His 2002 book of selected poems, Mi Revalueshanry Fren, distinguished him as the second living poet—and the first black poet—to have his work published in Penguin’s Modern Classics series. Uncompromising, political, and full of revolutionary fire, his iconic collection Englan Is a Bitch (1980) confirmed him as the voice of his generation. Spend time with him here.

Jacob Sam-La Rose’s debut collection, Communion (mouthmark, 2006), was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. In 2007 he was commissioned by the Arts Council England to write a poem commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. The result—Magnitude—grapples with the enormity and scale of the subject and its political resonance. He is equally at home with the fine detail of autobiography, as his account of his (non)relationship with his father in “Never” attests. Born in Guyana, he is a featured artist on the UK-wide spoken-word tour Speechless, which brings British and Southeast Asian writers together to explore issues around freedom of speech. A teacher, mentor, and committed techno-geek, he also publishes Metaroar (an online poetry listings magazine), runs the online writing community Vineyard, and is director of the London Teenage Poetry Slam.

Trinidad-born Anthony Joseph is the author of two collections, Desafinado (1994) and Teragaton (1998). His African Origins of UFOs is an intoxicating narrative in verse that blurs the edges between poetry and prose and sits somewhere between surreal sci-fi, hard-boiled crime fiction, Franz Fanon, and what Joseph himself describes as “afropsychadelicnoir.” Set in Toucan Bay, a Caribbean enclave of the planet Kunu Supia, it is the story of bootleg melanin hustler Joe Sambucus Nigra and his arch-nemesis, the hired assassin Bo Nuggy.

K

In 1991, the publication of The Adoption Papers catapulted a young Scottish poet into the limelight. In it, Jackie Kay, who was born to a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother and adopted into a white family as a baby, dramatized her search for cultural identity in language that was colloquial, honest, lyrical, and unsentimental. In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New and Selected Poems, which was shortly followed by the epic slavery poem The Lamplighter in 2008. The Guardian described The Lamplighter as “huge, sprawling, angry, defiant and gripping.” Her contribution to English and Scottish literature was recognized in 2006 when she was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire). Listen to her read here.

Mimi Khalvati, born in Tehran and brought up on the Isle of Wight, returned to Iran at 17, then came back to the UK when she was 25. This dual heritage is particularly reflected in her relationship with form. Her sixth collection, The Meanest Flower (Carcanet, 2007), includes a “gracefully crafted sonnet sequence” as well as a series of ghazals—an ancient Persian form that consists of at least five metrically uniform couplets and a repeating end-line refrain that has its roots in an oral tradition. The ghazal also echoes, literally, the cry of the wounded gazelle, and nowhere more so than in her heartfelt lament “My Son”: “He’s wearing a red silk shirt, my son. / He’s done me a terrible hurt, my son. . . . A mother is earth, but earth is sick. / A mother’s nothing but dirt, my son.” She is also a founder of the independent education center The Poetry School.

L

Poet, broadcaster, and maverick dandy-about-town Lemn Sissay kicked off his ongoing residency at the South Bank Centre at its biannual festival, Poetry International, in 2006. He’s a writer who likes to bring poetry to public places in new and arresting ways, so every night a new Sissay poem was projected onto the stark modernist walls of the Royal Festival Hall. His poem “EMAIL” has been displayed as a counterweight in a glass lift that goes up to the Poetry Library, so that the ascension of the elevator pulls the poem down, thus acting as a cursor that scrolls through the text. The City of London commissioned “Gilt of Cain,” a collaboration with sculptor Michael Visocchi to commemorate the bicentenary of abolition, which was unveiled by Bishop Desmond Tutu in September 2008. For Sissay, the journey with poetry has always been one of utilizing the art form as an agent of social change, whether via theme or medium. His parents were Eritrean, and Sissay was fostered at a young age before being sent to a residential care home, an aspect of his biography detailed in his acclaimed one-man theater piece “Something Dark” (2005) as well as in “Before We Get into This,” the first poem from a new collection, Listener, published by Canongate (2008). He has just returned from the Cape Farewell Voyage, which sent a group of artists, including Jarvis Cocker and Laurie Anderson, to the Arctic to experience climate change.

M

Inspired by Kwame Dawes’s Afro Style School, Malika’s Kitchen is a London-based writers’ collective founded by Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, and Jacob Sam-La Rose. Friends and family include poet and graphic artist Inua Ellams, whose illustrated 13 Negro Fairy Tales (2008) was the basis for the one-man show The 14th Tale; Ugandan-born Nick Makoha, whose chapbook The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man was published by mouthmark (2005); and Denise Saul, whose White Narcissi (2007) was also published by mouthmark and was a Poetry Book Society selection. Sheree Mack, whose work explores her Trinidadian-Ghanaian-Barbadian-English heritage, runs a similar group called Identity on Tyne, which supports and publishes black writers in northeast England.

N

Every scene has its star, and currently Daljit Nagra is shining bright. Not only was his 2007 debut collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, published by Faber and Faber, but he is also fearless, if not extravagant! in his use of the exclamation mark! If I sound flippant, it’s only to offset the widespread critical acclaim and general adulation that his work deservedly attracts. His ear for the colloquial is sharp—especially English as spoken by Indians from his parents’ native Punjab—his use of language luminous, and his experimentation underpinned by tightly controlled form. As Kathryn Maris writes in Poetry London, “there isn’t a single weak poem” in the book.

O

October is the UK’s Black History Month.

P

Based in England’s rural West Country, Louisa Adjoa Parker is of English-Ghanaian origin. Her first collection of unflinching autobiographical poems, Salt, Sweat & Tears (2007), has garnered considerable critical acclaim, notably from Selima Hill, who says, “She writes like a fire blazes . . . her world explodes in your face. She insists you listen. She shares her pain with a lightness of touch that makes it all the more heart-breaking.”

Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a busy man. A poet, novelist, and broadcaster, he set up Flipped Eye publishing in 2001, which publishes poetry and international fiction under its Waterways and mouthmark imprints and this year launched its innovative Lexeyecon—a project in which selected poems from Flipped Eye authors are collaboratively translated on a wiki. As a Ghanaian writer and publisher, and an advocate for African writing, Parkes is committed to raising the profile of oral and performance literatures as “viable forms of artistic interpretation and learning.” This ethos flows through to his work in schools, which reflects his diverse influences: a recent workshop saw him getting kids to recite W.B. Yeats and Kipling over hip-hop beats. He is also an activist and co-editor, with Kadija Sesay, of Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa (2007). Parkes has published three poetry chapbooks; he has a novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, forthcoming from Jonathan Cape in 2009; and his poem “Tin Roof” was selected for Poems on the Underground, a program that puts poetry on the London subway.

Based in Leeds, Peepal Tree Press publishes Caribbean and black British poetry, including works by Kwame Dawes, Raman Mundair, and Dorothea Smartt, whose new collection, Ship Shape, launched this fall. Ship Shape has at its heart a series of poems based on the story of Samboo, an African slave who was brought from the Caribbean by a Lancaster sea captain as a “present” for his wife. Smartt is also the poetry editor of SableLitMag, a magazine conceived by editor and literary activist Kadija George, who in 1996 initiated residential writers’ courses in the Gambia and Cuba and is series editor of Peepal Tree’s Inscribe imprint. Current activities include F-Words, a creative collaboration and publication between poets and visual artists. The project includes contributions from Rommi Smith, who was Parliamentary Writer in Residence to the British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People exhibition; Seni Seneviratne; Khadijah Ibrahim; and the exiled Malawian Jack Mapanje—recipient of the United States’ Fonlon-Nichols Award for his contribution to poetry and human rights—whose Beasts of Nalunga (Bloodaxe, 2007) was short-listed for the Forward Prize.

Planet Poetry is a newly established outfit charged with keeping poetry alive and thriving in the 21st century. Formed by a consortium of poetry organizations and backed by the Arts Council England, it is headed by Ruth Borthwick, the former director of Poetry International, with a specific goal to “help develop a new economy for poets and poetry by increasing the number, range and diversity of people who engage with poetry.” As a strategic advisory body, Planet Poetry works behind the scenes to help its constituent organizations create a unified agenda for the industry at large.

Q

is for quality. In her contribution to the Freeverse (see "F”) report, Bernadine Evaristo commented on the lack of minority voices in mainstream publications. “The editors we surveyed were adamant that their selection criteria were based purely on quality,” Evaristo wrote, “But quality is not a standalone entity that exists outside of the contexts of history, culture, and literary traditions. It is critical approval—which is evidenced by publishing and review—that is the engine behind the poetry world.”

R

Roger Robinson’s debut collection, Suitcase (2004), is a remarkably assured and honest portrait of adolescent and adult angst set in his native Trinidad. His is conversational poetry that paints an intimate family portrait populated by often amusing, three-dimensional characters, as in “Player,” a poem about a gigolo uncle: “He owned a stacked wall of eight-track soul love / ballads. He had no job, yet he always had money, / he never cleaned up but his house was spotless. . . .” Robinson is also a short-fiction writer, lyricist, and musician who has performed with the iconic hip-hop groups Run-DMC and De La Soul.

S

Sudeep Sen has lived, worked, and studied in New York and now divides his time between London and his native New Delhi. His poetry has been translated into numerous languages, including Korean, Arabic, Macedonian, and Hebrew. He is also the editor of Atlas, an international literary journal that publishes new writing, art, and image in India and the UK.

Saradha Soobrayen is an emerging writer whose family origins are in the island of Mauritius. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2004, is poetry editor at the queer literary journal Chroma, and is widely anthologized, most recently in I am twenty people!, New Writing 15, and Oxford Poets Anthology 2007. A sensuous lilt characterizes her work, such as “Like cold air passing through lips” with its mesmeric refrain “journey, draining, geranium. “I was reading the letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West,” Soobrayen tells me when I discuss the selection on the phone with her, “and I became interested in the quality of language and imagery, in the directness and the phrasing. There is a narrative, but you don’t get all of the plot, it’s about the images creating a narrative of their own.” Likewise, in the undulating “On the water meadows”, musicality rather than meaning is the motivation. “When I say ‘those places you were yearning for: Bermuda, Pacific, Icelandic waters,’ it is more important for me to create the mood than it is to achieve a geographical accuracy. I wanted to suspend the commitment to meaning so we can hear the music of the poem.”

T

is for T-Shirt and Jeans, a poetry night at London’s Whitechapel Gallery hosted by Priscilla Sim and young gun Yemisi Blake, who describes himself as a spoken-word artist, poet, curator, and mentor. Also up and coming on the performance circuit are Jasmine Ann Cooray, Joseph Coehlo, and 19-year-old Louis Antwi, a former Lynk Reach London Teenage Poetry Slam champion who now organizes his own Open Mic night at London’s Roundhouse.

U

Up Yours!: What Benjamin Zephaniah (see "Z") famously said to the offer of an OBE (Order of the British Empire).

V

is for Vineyard, an online writers’ community started by poet and online activist Jacob Sam-La Rose.

W

The title of the literary magazine Wasafiri means “traveler” in Kiswahili, and editor Susheila Nasta has stayed true to this sense of journey since the magazine’s inception. After nearly a quarter century in existence, it is the grandmother of independent intellectual black publishing and has consistently championed both international contemporary writing and Britain’s diverse heritage. Now quarterly, the magazine has been bought by Routledge, although it retains—fiercely—its editorial autonomy. Wasafiri publishes new poetry and is an important outlet for emerging writers.

X

No, I don’t have a Xavier or a Xenia to list here. Instead I offer the 57 Productions, a performance agency with a—wait for it—X-traordinarily diverse mix of poets on its roster, including Val Bloom, Merle Collins, Salena Godden, and Mikey Smith. Hear them and a host of others on the original poetry jukebox; or watch them on the subscription video jukebox, which includes 17 poetry films and showcases a range of spoken-word and poetry performances. The agency also produces poetry events and tours across the country.

Y

At age 20, Yemesi Blake is in the ascendant, having just been made an emerging artist-in-residence at London’s South Bank Centre. He was commissioned to write a poem on Charles Darwin for the Wellcome Trust in 2007, and recently mentored a team of young curators for Fresh off the Page at the London Literature Festival, which featured London-Somali Muslim teenager Warsan Shire—whose hard-hitting, politicized, and evocatively complex poetry belies her age.

Z

Benjamin Zephaniah, whose work is rooted in the Jamaican dub poetry tradition, is proud to be political; his collection Too Black, Too Strong (Bloodaxe, 2001) includes poems written while he was in residence at the office of human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield.