Full Description
In Passport to Here and There Grace Nichols traces a journey that moves from the coastal memories of a Guyana childhood to life in Britain and her adoptive Sussex landscape. In these movingly redemptive and celebratory poems, she embraces connections and re-connections, with the ability to turn the ordinary into something vivid and memorable whether personal or public, contemporary or historical, most notably in a sonnet-sequence which grew out of a recent return trip to Guyana. Her ninth collection of adult poems and her fourth book with Bloodaxe, Passport to Here and There makes a significant contribution both to Caribbean and to British poetry.
Our Demerara voices rising and falling
growing more and more golden
like a canefield's metamorphosis
from shoots into sugar --
the crystal memory shared with a river...
Passport to Here and There is Grace Nichols's third new collection since her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010), following Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and The Insomnia Poems (2017). It is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
Contents
9 Preface
Rites of passage
14 If I Were to Meet
16 Litany
17 Picture My Father
18 Greensleeves
19 The Shilling and the Princess
20 Joy-riders
21 Ole Higue
22 Masquerade
23 Against the Tradewinds
24 Confirmation
25 A Chant for Mater
26 Sweet Fifteen
27 Spirit-rising
30 Georgetown Romance
In the shade of a London plane tree
32 Viewing the Thames
33 In the Shade of a London Plane Tree
34 O Tea
35 Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November
36 Robin Redbreast
36 Nuptial on Brighton Beach
37 The Hills in Our Memory
38 Lewes Night Out
39 Tea with Demerara Sugar
40 Blackberrying Black Woman
41 Ode to a Daffodil
42 Battle
43 This Destiny
Back-homing: Georgetown snapshot sonnets
47 Landing
48 Reunion
49 Where Blue Sea Turns
50 Bourda
51 Where My Childhood Left Him
52 El Hombre del Oro
53 From the Balcony of Eldorado
54 Price I Pay
55 In the Fleeting Now
56 Like an Heiress
57 Eldorado
58 Sorry
59 Against My Heart
60 Georgetown
Interesting times?
63 Interesting Times?
64 At Stockwell Tube
65 In Praise of Surgeons
66 Kittitian Girl
67 Faith
68 Helen of the Gables
69 To Mark Your Passing
71 A Sacrament of Words
72 Lost in Translation
73 Apple and Mango
74 Rivers
75 Dawn Wind
76 Atlantic
80 Biographical note
