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.
- ISBN10 1780375328
- ISBN13 9781780375328
- Publish Date 25 June 2020 (first published 30 April 2020)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 80
- Language English