BOOK REVIEW
a tragic event that would inspire more primal feelings. In my opinion, Richard Selby fares better in his poem From Romney Marsh , brilliantly capturing the atmosphere of the apparently run-down area, made transient by the dams and dykes that litter its coastline. To me, the best poem included in the book is Anthony Barnett’s Blood Flow . Brinton writes that the poem becomes ‘an answer to some of the poet’s preoccupations’. Throughout it, Barnett seems troubled by the past, referring to past events in an almost conversational fashion, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks and repeatedly questioning what appears to be the present. Another highlight is Paul Selby’s Apple Orchard , which is similarly complex in potential meaning and employs an excellent evocation of his surroundings:
Brinton does an excellent job of explaining the circumstances inwhich
many Dulwich poets rose to prominence
iced air the hunter’s moon stalked the frozen orchard dew crackles on each grass blade to the town’s lights the berried bushes stooped like men.
website which appeared to be distributing information to terrorists which had a server in Connecticut; the case was thrown out of court. Return To Exile could refer to entering or leaving prison, as suggested to me by the opening stanza:
The inky waters skim fingers stretched overboard a boat ferrying me along a humid morning
Mick Imlah’s The Ayrshire Orpheus is an entirely different proposition, transposing the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to Scotland and using ‘a mixture of tones, the wryly comic and the deeply moving’, as Brinton puts it. On paper it shouldn’t work, but it does. Finally, Return To Exile by Talha Ahsan is possibly my favourite of those included. Ahsan was detained for over six years without bail in high-security prisons in the UK and was extradited to the US for allegedly participating in an Islamic media
The atmosphere of a possibly unfamiliar crowd is brilliantly conveyed in the second stanza, and I particularly like the line ‘to a song playing on the radio; my bib could have been its lyric sheet’. Brinton remarks that Ahsan is influenced by the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and I could see the title of the poem sitting comfortably next to Fite Dem Back on the track-listing of Forces of Victory . I’m not sure why, but I feel that there is somehow a connection between this poem and another of Johnson’s, Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem) . In any case, both Ahsan’s poem and the latter are highly recommended, as is the whole book. I hope that in the 21st century, Dulwich manages to produce as high a standard of poetry as it did during the 20th.
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