England and Nowhere

Another skilful weaver of demotic language is Kevyn Alan Arthur, whose England and Nowhere is also published by the Leeds-based Peepal Tree Press. There are some very memorable and approachable poems in this collection. There is nothing distant or esoteric about Arthur’s work. Memories of childhood, of colonial mind-shackling, of simple situations giving birth to realisations and imagery while just ‘waiting for the charcoal to start,’ of loving evocations of the Caribbean islands and their precious people, such as: ‘these little lumps of rock pushed heaving up... / and which are now barnacled by a precarious people,/ who live their lives ducking from hurricanes.’

Arthur’s is a new, fresh voice, direct and unpretending, still bewildered by the insights that he creates and the contradictions and surprises inside them.

‘You know how it is:
the trouble with poetry 
like the trouble with life, 
is that it is
and is not.’