There is an Anger That Moves

In the Jamaican poet Kei Miller’s second collection, published since his move to the UK, the first and strongest sequence, ‘In This New Country’, is a tribute to the strangeness of arriving in a Britain already colonised by Jamaicans ‘in reverse’ (the term is Louise Bennett’s): ‘Walking through Peckham / in London, West Moss Road in Manchester, / you pass green and yellow shops / where tie-headwomen bargain over the price / of dasheen’. Similar contradictions abound. The speaker, who is only a mediocre dancer back home, ‘can dance / dances that have fallen out / of season, like mangoes in February’ yet be adored as some exotic god: ‘in this country, you move like fire / amongst the cane, you move like sugar / and like ocean’. The collection is full of such haunting images, and as in the prolific Miller’s earlier books (the short stories in Fear of Stones and a previous collection of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies) the sacred and the profane commingle: ‘you say bomboclawt / softly, like a prayer’. Most shockingly, a whimsical rhapsody on the ‘revolutionary properties’ of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream suddenly plunges into darker terrain:
Rory’s story begins in New York
in a parlour that does not sell swirls
or double cones, one flavour atop another.
A sign at the door says: No Mixing!
And when he was in love with a black man
they went to this store and thought
the sign was for them -
that the owner was upset not because
they were gay, but because one was a nigger-lover,
and the other a nigger.
This ability to reveal seething and hybrid impulses beneath the mask of identity is Miller’s greatest strength in this poised, sardonic volume of poems. Though at times overly self-conscious, his writing shows that Caribbean poetry can move beyond the strictures of modernism without ghettoising itself into either the ‘black’ or ‘performance’ markets.
In the Jamaican poet Kei Miller’s second collection, published since his move to the UK, the first and strongest sequence, ‘In This New Country’, is a tribute to the strangeness of arriving in a Britain already colonised by Jamaicans ‘in reverse’ (the term is Louise Bennett’s): ‘Walking through Peckham / in London, West Moss Road in Manchester, / you pass green and yellow shops / where tie-headwomen bargain over the price / of dasheen’. Similar contradictions abound. The speaker, who is only a mediocre dancer back home, ‘can dance / dances that have fallen out / of season, like mangoes in February’ yet be adored as some exotic god: ‘in this country, you move like fire / amongst the cane, you move like sugar / and like ocean’. The collection is full of such haunting images, and as in the prolific Miller’s earlier books (the short stories in Fear of Stones and a previous collection of poems, Kingdom of Empty Bellies) the sacred and the profane commingle: ‘you say bomboclawt / softly, like a prayer’. Most shockingly, a whimsical rhapsody on the ‘revolutionary properties’ of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream suddenly plunges into darker terrain:
Rory’s story begins in New York
in a parlour that does not sell swirls
or double cones, one flavour atop another.
A sign at the door says: No Mixing!
And when he was in love with a black man
they went to this store and thought
the sign was for them -
that the owner was upset not because
they were gay, but because one was a nigger-lover,
and the other a nigger.
This ability to reveal seething and hybrid impulses beneath the mask of identity is Miller’s greatest strength in this poised, sardonic volume of poems. Though at times overly self-conscious, his writing shows that Caribbean poetry can move beyond the strictures of modernism without ghettoising itself into either the ‘black’ or ‘performance’ markets.