Ten

poets of the new generation

Karen McCarthy Woolf

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781780373829
• eBook ISBN: 9781780373836
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Ten: poets of the new generation presents the work of ten exciting British poets from diverse backgrounds. It is the third anthology from The Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, a national programme supporting exceptional black and Asian poets founded by the writer Bernardine Evaristo in 2007. Already making a big impact on the British poetry scene, poets from the series have included Sarah Howe, the 2016 winner of both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; Mona Arshi, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016; and Warsan Shire, who collaborated with Beyoncé on her visual album, Lemonade in 2016, which featured many of Shire's poems. This latest anthology in the Ten series will not disappoint readers hoping to discover more exceptional talent. It includes poets with even more diverse backgrounds ranging from Somalia and Nigeria through to Jamaica and the multiculturalism of Macau, and features the first poet from Latin America. These are poets who interrogate race and explode any ideas of a page/stage divide. Fierce, unexpected, sometimes beautiful and always passionate, here are ten poets to savour and enjoy. The poets included are: Raymond Antrobus, Omikemi Natacha Bryan, Leonardo Boix, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Will Harris, Ian Humphreys, Jennifer Lee Tsai, Momtaza Mehri, Yomi Sode and Degna Stone.

OMIKEMI NATACHA BRYAN

OMIKEMI NATACHA BRYAN is a poet and performance maker. She grew up in south London with her Jamaican grandparents. Her work has been published in numerous magazines including Iota, Ambit and The Rialto. Her debut pamphlet poetry collection, If I talked everything my eyes saw, won the 2014 Pighog/ Poetry School pamphlet competition. Ritual plays an important role in her arts practice, which also includes movement practices such as Capoeira Angola and visual art. Her ritual theatre performance, Nine Night, was featured as part of The Yard’s 2015 experimental theatre festival.

PASCALE PETIT:

Omikemi Natacha Bryan’s poems are spellbinding incantations to transmute trauma. Violent things happen: a girl is found assaulted on the bank of a a stream, a drug addict plugs himself into an electric socket, a mother is run over by a truck, a chest is plundered for a heart, and a god is summoned to help, but ‘God / was on his knees / swallowing a pitchfork in an alley’. Ordeals are transformed through conjuring tricks mainly achieved through the electrifying vigour of her lines. Bryan has a knack for adroit effects, but it isn’t just the images that slide about and melt into each other, the rhythm syncopates like improvised jazz, or the Capoeira Angola that she practises.

Chants – sometimes in dialect – help to create a heightened atmosphere, where what’s going on evades logic, moves with an intensity that speaks to our subconscious, as if something indescribable is being articulated on a subliminal level. There is the sense of an unspeakable story ghosting the articulated lyric, a truth that dares not be written.

Often the subject animating the poems is an ancestral character, such as the Warner, or charismatic Queen, or a guileless child. These characters speak in riddles or behave like ecstatics, but it is because of the dynamic propulsion of The lines that they enthral us and can perform their lifesaving spells:

Queen stand up before me

sparkle and shine like the sun dancing in spider’s silk

then flickered and swayed until she melt, come like a pool in the earth.

At that time my head turned east, the rest of me stayed west

while her body of water spread till I was standing in her dress.

What is compelling about such portraits is how images and people blend into one another, in a sleight of hand where matter can shape-shift in a blink. Birds, feathers and whirlwinds sweep through and come to the narrator’s rescue. Such pyrotechnics give the poems a breathless pace. But it’s the simple descriptions that astonish, similes such as: ‘The people’s mouths hung like udders,’ and a girl ‘laid there / like an instrument, waiting to be played’.

Bryan’s influences include the disturbing but hopeful writing of Sapphire, Anthony Joseph’s autobiographical sequences, most notably Bird Head Son, and writer-activist Toni Cad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Contents
• NATHALIE TEITLER: Preface
• KAREN McCARTHY WOOLF: Introduction: A Beautiful and Necessary Complexity
• 1: OMIKEMI NATACHA BRYAN
• 2: VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY
• 3: WILL HARRIS
• 4: IAN HUMPHREYS
• 5: MOMTAZA MEHRI
• 6: DEGNA STONE
• 7: YOMI SODE
• 8: JENNIFER LEE TSAI
• 9: RAYMOND ANTROBUS
• 10: LEONARDO BOIX
• Editor’s biography
• Mentor biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Also available from Bloodaxe
• Copyright