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Roy McFarlane's second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane's intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader - and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience - where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.
Beginning With Your Last Breath, the debut poetry collection by Roy McFarlane, explores love, loss, adoption and identity in precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers, parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love, and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. Themes of place, identity, history, and race are interwoven with personal narratives in poems that touch on everything from the 'Tebbit Test' and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that 'place just off the M6'. McFarlane's poems are beautifully focused and crafted, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.
Celebrate Wha? is a book of many voices. It is a book of questions and answers. It is an anthology of poems about identity and race, curried goat 'n' rice. Dreadlock Alien, Sue Brown, Marcia Calame, Evoke, Martin Glynn, Michelle Hubbard, Kokumo, Roy McFarlane, Chester Morrison and Moqapi Selassie explore what it means to be black and British and from the West Midlands. This is the English language in a Caribbean coat, Auden in a Creole accent, writing with a reggae rhythm. Celebrate Wha? is poetry as Wordsworth said it should be - 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. Mixing dub, grime and performance poetry, anger and laughter, politics and music, these ten poets know what they want to say and know how to say it.
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A fresh, concise but wide-ranging introduction to and overview of British and Irish cinema, this volume contains 24 essays, each on a separate seminal film from the region. Films under discussion include 'Pink String and Sealing Wax', 'Room at the Top', 'The Italian Job', 'Orlando', and 'Sweet Sixteen'.
From Banks’s brewery’s yeasty stink to groaty pudding to spicy curry, Sebastian Groes and R. M. Francis have assembled a new literary history of the smells and (childhood) memories that belong to the Black Country. This often overlooked region of the United Kingdom at the frontlines of post-industrial upheaval is a veritable treasure trove for studying the relationship between olfaction and place-specific memory. Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between smell and memory in which the contributions consider both personal and communal memory. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, memory studies, literary studies and ph...
This book contains the winning and commended poems from the Verve Festival 2018 City Themed Poetry Competition judged by Luke Kennard. They are the best of an extremely good bunch of poems that we received on the subject - from all over the country, but also from Europe, the USA, Africa and The Middle East. Alongside these poems you will find six city poems that Verve commissioned from our own selection of local poets of note in Birmingham: Roy McFarlane, Bohdan Piasecki, Amerah Saleh, Jenna Clake, Casey Bailey and Ahlaam Moledina. The book launched at Verve Poetry Festival 2018's sold out City Poems event hosted by Luke. Featured were the commissioned poets and the three competition winners - C.I. Marhsall (who flew in from North Carolina for the event), Jacqueline Saphra and Claire Trevien. The event took place on Sat 17 Feb 2018 at Waterstones in Birmingham. The book is dedicated to Roy Fisher (1930-2017), Birmingham's first city poet, who's poem, Handsworth Liberties, provides the book's title.
Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; this Filigree anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalization of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of poets the Inscribe project has nurtured and continues to support.