The Way of the Poet

Praise for Living by Troubled Waters:

“Roy’s poetry has always been about history and liturgy, outrage and melody, meditation and agitation wrapped up in careful metrics of love… His sense of the UK’s black heritage and his insistence that it must be recognized power his sonorous poems. If there is a seer in current poetics, someone who stands before an audience that shouts, ‘preach’ and that person delivers passionate compositions that cry for justice and champion the disenfranchised, destroyed and silenced, then surely, our best candidate is Roy.” - Fred D’Aguiar

“Behold the poet building his house of language on altars to the dispossessed, the underserved, the marginalised, the survivors of empire: you cannot quit such radical urgency. You cannot tune McFarlane’s lyrical anguish or adoration out of your system: it lingers in the blood, like soul music, like good Jamaican Sunday lunch.” - Shivanee Ramlochan

“Roy McFarlane has created one of the most affecting and original explorations of race in modern times.” - Antony Owen

'Roy McFarlane sees poetry everywhere: in the grief he lives with after his friends die; in newspaper articles from the early 1800s; on narrowboats; in the hope that art can change us for the better; in the preventable tragedies of our terrifying wars; in language; in form; in the public voice of language and music and verse and form and kindness. This is a beautiful collection of essays, written from the generous heart of a skilled poet with the heart of the world in mind.'

-- Pádraig Ó Tuama

'The Way of the Poet is a warm-hearted, gentle guide, but don’t be fooled: so much wisdom and truth is packed into it that will challenge, provoke, and charge any reader to commit to their craft. Furthermore, it stands as a record of an artist at a time of transition, facing ageing and uncertainty, nostalgia and hope, from Bilston to Brighton via Jamaica. Do we need another book on poetic craft, on finding a voice? Maybe. Do we need this book, on finding hope and connection and dare I say joy? Emphatically, yes!'

-- Keith Jarrett

'In The Way of the Poet each chapter reads like a vignette taken from Roy McFarlane’s life. In a mix of memoir, interspersed with meditation, his own and other’s poetry, and directions on ‘the way to write a poem’, he takes readers on a journey which invites them to visualise the world, particularly social and historical Britain, from a poet’s gaze and a Black gaze. Roy McFarlane has created an insightful, and engrossing reading and learning experience.'

-- Kadija Sesay