Full Description
John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents.
His border territory ranges from Love in a Sceptred Isle, a novella-like narrative poem of a romance between Barbados-born photographer, Victor, and Welsh librarian, Rhiannon, told with lyrical tenderness and thought-provoking wit, to Casanova the Philosopher, a sequence of sonnets in the voice of the legendary Venetian philosophically observing 18th-century English ways in a tongue-in-cheek memoir and travelogue.
This is a diverse collection where the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy and elegiac rub shoulders alongside the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put - with the poet turning overnight lockdown gardener - as well as calypso poems, where the Guyana-born winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry puts on his hat as 'poetsonian', a term he coined in the 80s in tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian, a crucial strand of Agard's varied, innovative, and often satirical poetic output.
Contents
Love in a Sceptred Isle
11 Love in a Sceptred Isle
Navigating Continents
35 Flag Speaks
39 Windrush Postscript
40 A Citizen's Tale
41 Doing My Bit for Pomp and Pageantry
42 Gents of the Gentry
43 With the Accent on Accent
46 The Discharge of the Un-light Brigade
48 How Delroy Dee Lost His Job at English Heritage House
51 Wall Speaks
52 Diversity in de Market
53 Potato Speaks
55 Biscuit Speaks
56 Meeting Old Father Thames
59 Pythias the Greek in Britannia
62 The Migration of Coconut Water
66 We Mosquitoes
68 Devon Jamboy Frederiksted, de Last of de Danish West Indians
71 Ice Speaks
72 The Murmur of the Forest in an Adjective
74 Saluting Derek
76 Walt
78 Dear Michael
80 A Farewell to Poet James Berry's Hat
81 Gone But Still Spring Cleaning
83 Three Siblings of the Word
85 The Creature Known as Michael Rosen
87 Namaste Mr Lear
89 My Little Guy, Says Edith Fawkes
90 Monsieur Voltaire Commits a Faux Pas in 18th-century England
93 Glorious Uncertainty in de Bedroom
96 Bards in White Flannels
97 Bowdlerising the Bard
98 Viagra in Me Cocoa
100 Erasmus in England, 1499
103 The Fool's Yule
104 In Your Hands
The Plants Are Staying Put
109 This Thing Called Gardening
115 Weeds
117 The Plants Are Staying Put
118 Lewes to London Post-lockdown
Casanova the Philosopher
123 Casanova the Philosopher
