"Truths unsettled: Two poets’ dialogue about history and decolonisation"

The pair lean on each other for solidarity as the elegiac note becomes increasingly dominant. The privations of isolation and the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on Black and minority communities descend like a shroud over Dawes’s exchanges. And his charged missives on the death of the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite (“my marker, my art, my permission”) are among the book’s most riveting moments.

Poetry’s relation to history, memory and knowledge concentrates the poets’ minds on the efficacy of their art. This self-consciousness distils a potent frankness and vulnerability.