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A study of Grace Nichols' writing that combines feminist and postcolonial reading strategies and places her work in both a Caribbean and black British context. It also shows how Nichols' poetry explored the boundaries of race, class and gender. It is aimed at students of literature in schools and in higher education.
First published in 1983 to gain the distinction of being the first book of poetry written by a Caribbean woman to have won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, it has since become a modern classic. Rightly proclaimed a significant narrative of the African Caribbean woman in proclaiming the recovery of her memory, the book celebrates and evokes memories of the triangular trade in enslavement from the African continent to the cane plantations of the Caribbean through the voice of an unnamed African woman.
An impressive galaxy of new poems that kids will love from one of the UK’s most exciting contemporary poets. From Aurora Borealis, Sun – You’ re a Star and A Matter of Holes, to Lady Winter’s Rap, the Earthworm Sonnet and You – a Universe Yourself, this is brilliant poetry with an astonishing range – comic riddles, animals and nature, home truths and the explosive wonder of the cosmos. This is a poetry book like no other
Beauty is a fat black woman walking the fields pressing a breezed hibiscus to her cheek while the sun lights up her feet Nichols gives us images that stare us straight in the eye, images of joy, challenge, accusation. Her 'fat black woman' is brash; rejoices in herself; poses awkward questions to politicians, rulers, suitors, to a white world that still turns its back. Grace Nichols writes in a language that is wonderfully vivid yet economical of the pleasures and sadnesses of memory, of loving, of 'the power to be what I am, a woman, charting my own futures'.
Grace Nichols' poetry has a gritty lyricism that addresses the transatlantic connections central to the Caribbean-British experience. Her work brings a mythic awareness and a sensuous musicality that is at the same time disquieting. Born and educated in Guyana, Grace Nichols moved to Britain in 1977. I Have Crossed an Ocean is a comprehensive selection spanning some 25 years of her writing.
A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This impo...
In her latest collection, The Insomnia Poems, Grace Nichols explores those nocturnal hours when Sleep (the thief who nightly steals your brain) is hard to come by, and the politics of the day hard to shut out, never mind the lavender-scented pillow. Here memories of her own Guyana childhood mingle with the sleeping spectres of dreams and folk legends such as Sleeping Beauty. A lyrical interweaving of tones and textures invites the reader into the zones between sleep and no-sleep, between the solitude of the dark and the awakening of the light. The Insomnia Poems is Grace Nichols's first new collection since Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). Neither that collection nor this one is included in her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010).
"This beautifully illustrated book captures the rhythms, flavours, and textures of Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.A huge range of different poems is accompanied by vivid illustrations that will capture children's imaginations and inspire creative language development. The rhythmic patterns will particularly appeal to younger readers." -- Oxfam.
Art, landscape, and memory are interwoven strands in the fabric of Grace Nichols' latest collection, Picasso, I Want My Face Back. The book opens with a long poem in the voice of Dora Maar, who, as Picasso's muse and mistress, was the inspiration for his iconic painting, The Weeping Woman. The poems are almost interlocking reflections that echo the cubist manner of the painting and allow us to enter the shifting surfaces of Dora Maar's mind and her journey of self reclamation.
'There is something holy about Georgetown at dusk. The Atlantic curling the shoreline . . .' The first adult novel from Grace Nichols, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2021. It is 1960 and the Walcotts are moving into the city from the village of Highdam. School headmaster Archie Walcott knows that he will miss the openness of pastureland; his wife, Clara, the women and their nourishing 'womantalk and roots magic; and Gem, their daughter, her loved jamoon and mango trees. Their move into the rough and tumble Charlestown neighbourhood couldn't have come at a worse time, for the serenity of the city is exploded by political upheavals in the country's struggle for independence. Under...