Tea and Poetry
I’ve just finished “Letters To America” by Fred D’Aguiar.
This is frankly the only collection I’ve read relating to politics / race / violence in America that hasn’t made me want to pull my own face off. It writes from a place of personal experience and of empathy.
It’s sensitively and analytically written and I’d highly recommend it if you want to read something from a British writer that frankly, just makes some good old fashioned non-shouty sense.
“In Letters to America the Guyanese-British poet, novelist and playwright Fred D'Aguiar has some difficult things to say. The twenty-two poems are full of lived tales and memories - of Britain, the Caribbean and the United States - and of specific and shared memory. He supplies some of the difficult detail he has omitted from earlier poems. The modern mid-city Los Angeles sun-rise we experience is a cacophony, violent and memorable music rendered in prose. The poems weave in and out of familiar forms, including terza rima, casting and breaking spells. There is peril at every turn, and opportunity.
As for tea I have paired it off with a fabulous Mango yoghurt blend this afternoon in my glass teapot that I can’t get enough of lately 🫖
“Fury” by David Morley.
Another great recent read. Quite hard going because of the abstract element to his writing and his liberal use of Romani dialect, but I found this collection to be incredibly passionate and dripping with the passion of what is important to him as a writer. It’s an interesting social text this one. Would still recommend.
“Watching a tedious boxing match in Hull, Philip Larkin turned to a friend with the words “Only connect”. It’s a mantra with equal appeal for David Morley and the subject of one of his poems, heavyweight boxer Tyson Fury. The poems of FURY are acts of radical connection across cultures and language. At some point a moratorium on British poets writing about John Clare will have to be considered, but Morley pulls it off with aplomb in “Kop Kop to his Horses He Sings and No More”, in which Clare and “the Gypsy” bond over their love of horses. The dialectal richness of Clare’s poems is matched by Morley’s use of Romani, as in ecstatic lists of birds and plants. FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: “All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were.”
- Excerpt from The Guardian review.
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