A collection of poetry commenting astutely on the demise of the British Empire in African and Caribbean communities, being a selection of 73 poems from five previous volumes of work and 24 new poems.

Casgliad o gerddi yn cynnwys sylwad au craff ar y crebachu a fu ar ddylanwad yr ymherodraeth Brydeinig ar gymunedau yn yr Affrig a'r Caribî, sef 73 cerdd o bum cyfrol flaenorol a 24 cerdd newydd.

This collection shows Landeg White to be a poet of strength and vision. Admittedly, it engenders a frustration that is a common consequence of such ‘Selected’ volumes: the paradoxically double sense of being offered both too much (how can one respond adequately to the sheer volume of colour and thought that accumulates over the course of the work collected here?) and too little (what goes on, for example, in the poems that are missing from those sequences which the book presents only in part?). However, both of these reactions are recognitions of the quality of the work involved: they admit that White’s is a poetry which compels attention.

What is perhaps most striking throughout this volume is the sense of White’s profound engagement with place. Crucially, this engagement is not one-dimensional; it does not, for example, rely on landscape to the exclusion of politics or people. Instead, White’s sensitivity to place constructs a poetic which weaves such elements together in a way that suggests a significant immersion in a variety of locations. Thus ‘October’s Sickle Moon’ portrays the poet Ibne Mucana al-Isbuni, a man whose engagement with his locale (Alcabideche) leads him to a wry assessment of its physical conditions (its ‘wretched soil’ sees him ‘harvesting thorns / with my sharp and agile sickle’), whilst the poet-persona locates the place in terms of its in-betweenness and its consequent potentiality (‘this all-man’s land, neither Europe nor Africa’).

Alongside such engagements with place, there are celebrations of human connections (‘The Exploding Gorse-Pods’) and of family (‘The Platform’). There is a profound and moving lyricism, such as at the end of ‘Spain’ when the poet-speaker, observing a march of old men in Madrid, asks ‘Which of us will passion keep so young?’ But, in the background to all this, politics and violence form a recurrent theme. Thus, in ‘Incident at a Poetry Reading’, the public performance of poetry raises the possibility of ‘detention without trial’. Similarly, ‘Refugee’ cannot avoid troubling images of bombers, napalm, and ‘the red trench [which] swallows the charred corpses’. As White makes clear, the poetics of place are never far from the sometimes-brutal politics of specific locations.

Matthew Jarvis

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.