Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets

By Roddy Lumsden

Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of “the pluralist now”. It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry. These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland – from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway – as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation’s most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns, plus an author photograph. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780375588

Roddy Lumsden

Roddy Lumsden’s first book Yeah Yeah Yeah (1997) was shortlisted for Forward and Saltire prizes. His second collection The Book of Love (2000), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His latest collections are Third Wish Wasted (2009), Terrific Melancholy (2011), Not All Honey (2014), which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award, and So Glad I'm Me (2017). His anthology Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. He is a freelance writer, specialising in quizzes and word puzzles, and has represented Scotland twice on BBC Radio 4's Round Britain Quiz. He has held several residencies, including ones with the City of Aberdeen, St Andrews Bay Hotel, and as “poet-in-residence” to the music industry when he co-wrote The Message, a book on poetry and pop music (Poetry Society, 1999). His other books include Vitamin Q: a temple of trivia, lists and curious words (Chambers Harrap, 2004). Born in St Andrews, he lived in Edinburgh for many years before moving to London.

Book preview

IDENTITY PARADE

New British & Irish Poets

Edited by Roddy Lumsden

Identity Parade presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety. It is the first anthology to comprehensively represent the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of the pluralist now. It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the breadth of styles and approaches characteristic of our current poetry.

These writers are prospering all over Britain and Ireland – from Shetland to Aberystwyth, from Gravesend to Galway – as well as further afield. Many new and undersung poets appear alongside this generation’s most celebrated names, and probably for the first time in any major poetry anthology, more women writers than men are featured. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year.

Identity Parade is as accessible to the new reader as to the aficionado, with each poet introduced by a biographical note also covering their themes and concerns. This is the essential starting place for anyone interested in the poetry of here and now.

‘This important and timely book offers a fascinating window on to the wide variety of poetry being produced in Britain and Ireland at the moment… It’s an exhilarating anthology, its tone one of magnanimous pluralism. Not since Edward Lucie Smith’s British Poetry Since 1945, published by Penguin in 1970, has one anthology embraced such a wide range of both experimental and formalist styles.’ – Charles Bainbridge, Guardian

‘Imagination, intelligence, scope, ambition, technical power and musicality: these, rather than attitudes or stylistic similarity, are what mark these writers out.’ – Sean O’Brien, Poetry Review

Cover artwork: My Vows (1988-91) by Annette Messager

museum of modern art (moma), new york

© adagp, paris and dacs, london 2010

IDENTITY PARADE

New British & Irish Poets

Edited by Roddy Lumsden

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction: The Pluralist Now

Patience Agbabi (b. 1965)

The Wife of Bafa

Postmod:

The London Eye

Josephine Baker Finds Herself

Jonathan Asser (b. 1964)

Interlude

Something To Do

The Birdbath’s Saying Dive

No Mercy

Tiffany Atkinson (b. 1972)

Portrait of the Husband as Farmers’ Market

Autobiography without pronouns

In this one

Philology

Rain –

Simon Barraclough (b. 1966)

Frigidaire

The Open Road

Desert Orchid

Los Alamos Mon Amour

Paul Batchelor (b. 1977)

Keening

To a Halver

Secret Papers

Triage

Kate Bingham (b. 1971)

The Island-designing Competition

The Mouths of Babes

Dalby Bush Farm

De Beers

Julia Bird (b. 1971)

Five Years Trying to Win the Flower Show Vegetable Animal Class

Your Grandfather Would Have Wanted You to Have This

Breathing Pattern

Patrick Brandon (b. 1965)

Mountain Man

Dolphin

Higgs Bison

Grand Union

A Sloping Pitch

David Briggs (b. 1972)

Asking the Difficult Questions

Self-portrait in a Rear-view Mirror

Twenty Below Zero

Winter Music

Andy Brown (b. 1966)

The Last Geese

A Poem of Gifts

As the tide sucks out at daybreak

Samhain

Judy Brown (b. 1962)

The End of the Rainbow (or, What I Learned at the House of Colour)

Peckham Poem(s)

The New Neighbours

Unfamiliar Festivals

Colette Bryce (b. 1970)

The Smoke

Line,

Nevers

Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-mirror

In Defence of Old Men Dozing in Bookshops

Matthew Caley (b. 1959)

Acupuncture

King Size Rizlas

Big Sur

The Argument

For Howard Devoto

Siobhán Campbell (b. 1962)

Almost in Sight

Massy Wood

Miner

Vahni Capildeo (b. 1973)

Lilies

White as Jasmine

from Winter to Winter: August: North

Vacant Possession

What Is Your Guy Really Like?

Melanie Challenger (b. 1977)

Sleeping Beauty

Blue Whale

Stac Pollaidh or Regret

Pygmalion

Kate Clanchy (b. 1965)

Patagonia

Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell

The Bridge Over the Border

Love

Dark, Dark

Scan

Polly Clark (b. 1968)

Women

South Uist

Nibbling

Dog Opera

Thank You

Julia Copus (b. 1969)

Love, Like Water

In Defence of Adultery

Raymond, at 60

Topsell’s Beasts

A Soft-edged Reed of Light

Sarah Corbett (b. 1970)

Taking the Night Train

Shame

Kisses

The Dog’s Kiss

Claire Crowther (b. 1947)

Investigating the Easter Issue

Lost Child

Summerhouse

Next Door Moon

Open Plan

Tim Cumming (b. 1963)

Snow

Days

Foreign News

Danebury Ring

Late Picasso

Following the Bloom

Ailbhe Darcy (b. 1981)

Crossing

The Art of Losing

The mornings you turn into a grub

Swan Song

Peter Davidson (b. 1957)

The Englishman’s Catechism

Of Death, Fame and Immortality

Concerning Stillness and Distance

Nick Drake (b. 1961)

Eureka

Babylon

Sea Change

The Hunt By Night (1990)

The Ghost Train

Sasha Dugdale (b. 1974)

Ten Moons

Carnation, Bible

Maldon

Moor

from The Red House

Stolen

Chris Emery (b. 1963)

The Lermontov

Carl’s Job

The Destroyer’s Convention

Bernardine Evaristo (b. 1959)

from Lara

from The Emperor’s Babe

Paul Farley (b. 1965)

Dead Fish

Diary Moon

Keith Chegwin as Fleance

An Interior

Newts

North Atlantic Corridor

The Scarecrow Wears a Wire

Leontia Flynn (b. 1974)

The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled

Airports

By My Skin

Belfast

Annie Freud (b. 1948)

The Study of Disease

The Symbolic Meaning of Things and Reasons for Not Dying

Daube

A Scotch Egg

A Canaletto Orange

Alan Gillis (b. 1973)

The Ulster Way

Harvest

Whiskey

Jane Griffiths (b. 1970)

Epitaph for X

Valediction

Clairvoyance

Travelling Light

On Liking Glass Houses:

Vona Groarke (b. 1964)

To Smithereens

Ghosts

Bodkin

The Return

Jen Hadfield (b. 1978)

Melodeon on the Road Home

Unfledging

Hedgehog, Hamnavoe

Prenatal Polar Bear

Full Sheeptick Moon

Thrimilce – Isbister

The Blokes and Beasties

Sophie Hannah (b. 1971)

Long for This World

The Bridging Line

‘No Ball Games etc’

Tracey Herd (b. 1968)

Spring in the Valley of the Racehorse

Sir Ivor

Black Swan

Coronach

Kevin Higgins (b. 1967)

From the future, a postcard home

Almost Invisible

Shapeless Days Shuffling

The Great Depression

The Candidate

The Couple Upstairs

Matthew Hollis (b. 1971)

Hedge Bird

The Sour House

The Diomedes

A.B. Jackson (b. 1965)

A Ring

Lauder’s Bar

Foxes

Star

from Apocrypha

Anthony Joseph (b. 1966)

Conductors of his Mystery

The Cinema

The Myst

Luke Kennard (b. 1981)

Chorus

Daughters of the Lonesome Isle

The Forms of Despair

Instrumental #3

Scarecrow

Nick Laird (b. 1975)

Adeline

Donna

Pug

The Hall of Medium Harmony

The Eventual

Sarah Law (b. 1967)

Phase Transitions

Breathing

Parisian

from Stretch: A Yoga Sequence

Frances Leviston (b. 1982)

The Zombie Library

Sight

The Gaps

Moon

Scandinavia

Gwyneth Lewis (b. 1959)

Prayer for Horizon

A Golf-Course Resurrection

Night Passage to Nantucket

Memorial Sweater

John McAuliffe (b. 1973)

Flood

You Can See

Tinnitus

The Electric Jar

Chris McCabe (b. 1977)

Radio

The Essex Fox

Poem in Black Ink

Lemon Blue

Helen Macdonald (b. 1970)

Poem

MIR

Jack

Earth Station

Patrick McGuinness (b. 1968)

Heroes

Dust

The Age of the Empty Chair

Montreal

Blue

Kona Macphee (b. 1969)

Melbourne, evening, summertime –

Shrew

Pheasant and astronomers

Terminus

Waltz

Peter Manson (b. 1969)

Hymn to Light

In Vitro

Poem

Four Darks in Red

Familiars

D.S. Marriott (b. 1963)

The Day Ena Died

Tap

Over the Black Mountains

Sam Meekings (b. 1981)

Describing Angels to the Blind

Bees

Migration

Depth

Sinéad Morrissey (b. 1972)

from China

Shadows in Siberia According to Kapuściński

‘Love, the nightwatch…’

On Waitakere Dam

Daljit Nagra (b. 1966)

Look We Have Coming to Dover!

This Be the Pukka Verse

University

Our Town with the Whole of India!

Caitríona O’Reilly (b. 1973)

Octopus

Calculus

The Lure

Pandora’s Box

Alice Oswald (b. 1966)

Field

A Greyhound in the Evening After a Long Day of Rain

Shamrock Café

Woods etc.

Katherine Pierpoint (b. 1961)

Waterbuffalo

Burning the door

Cats Are Otherwise

Plumbline

Clare Pollard (b. 1978)

Puppetry

Fears of a Hypochondriac Insomniac

The Panther

Jacob Polley (b. 1975)

The Bridge

Rain

The Crow

The North-South Divide

The Turn

Diana Pooley (b. 1941)

The Bird

Listen Amelio,

Inscriptions

Back at Pathungra

King

Richard Price (b. 1966)

from A Spelthorne Bird List

Wake up and sleep

Languor’s whispers

Sally Read (b. 1971)

Fog

Mastectomy

Mafia Flowers

The Death-Bell

Instruction

Deryn Rees-Jones (b. 1968)

Trilobite

My Father’s Hair

from Quiver

Neil Rollinson (b. 1960)

Dreamtime

Constellations

Between Bradford and Pudsey

Long Exposure

Jacob Sam-la Rose (b. 1976)

The Beautiful

Blacktop Universe

A Life in Dreams

Plummeting

Anthony Rowland (b. 1970)

Lésvos

Damrak

Pie

Golem

James Sheard (b. 1962)

Four Mirrors

Cargo Cult

The Lost Testimony of R. Catesby

Café Verdi

Zoë Skoulding (b. 1967)

Trappist Brewers

History

Preselis with Brussels Street Map

New Year

Docks

Catherine Smith (b. 1962)

The Set of Optics You Wouldn’t Let Me Buy in Portobello Road Market, September 1984

Wonders

Picnic

The Fathers

Jean Sprackland (b. 1962)

The Way Down

Bracken

An Old Friend Comes to Stay

Hands

John Stammers (b. 1954)

Mary Brunton

A Younger Woman

Funeral

Testimony

Black Dog

Greta Stoddart (b. 1966)

Salvation Jane

The Crossing

Verfremdungseffekt

Greece

Object

Sandra Tappenden (b. 1956)

Promise

Bells

Waroirrs of the Whiled West

People who are drawn to take free stress tests

Tim Turnbull (b. 1960)

Sea Monsters

Lullaby for an Alcoholic

What was that?

Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn

Julian Turner (b. 1955)

Bert Haines’ Yard

Penalty of Stroke and Distance

A Nightjar

At Walcott

Mark Waldron (b. 1960)

The Brand New Dark is Getting In,

He’s Face Down in the Lake

The Well Dressed Street

The Very Slow Train,

Underneath the Gone Sky

Ahren Warner (b. 1986)

la brisure

Legare

Near Saint Mary Woolnoth, EC3

Léman

Tim Wells (b. 1966)

My Own Private Ida Lupino

The 1980s Are a Long Time Dead

Comin’ a Dance

L.A. Rain

Matthew Welton (b. 1969)

Poppy

An ABC of American Suicide

The fundament of wonderment

David Wheatley (b. 1970)

Chemical Plant

A Fret

La Ultima Canción de César Peru

Sam Willetts (b. 1962)

Home

A Child at Their Party

Truanting

Fur-sorting

Detoxing in the French Quarter

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch (b. 1966)

Stately Home

A Pair of Antlers

Indiscretions

Tamar Yoseloff (b. 1965)

Barnard’s Star

The Angle of Error

The Venetian Mirror

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction: The Pluralist Now

Identity Parade is an anthology representing the new generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990s. All the poets have either published first collections within the past 15 years or make their debut within the next year. It is a book in a tradition of generational anthologies which stretches back for decades. The most recent of these is Hulse, Kennedy and Morley’s The New Poetry, published by Bloodaxe in 1993. Previously, there had usually been a gap of a decade or so, going back to Penguin anthologies from Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion in the early 1980s and Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970, then to A. Alvarez’s 1962 The New Poetry and back further to various, generally factional anthologies – New Lines, New Signatures, The New Apocalypse – which aimed to represent what was happening in British and Irish poetry at that time.

There have been changes in the poetry world since the early 1990s, and since anthologies are as likely to be read by those with limited knowledge of the world of poetry as by the connoisseurs and critics within it, it seems useful to look briefly at what some of these are. Technological advances have made printing easier and less expensive, and the internet has fostered poetry networks. Britain now has three major prizes for poetry collections: the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Poetry Award.

The culture of readings, performances and festivals is thriving and widespread in a way it wasn’t in previous decades. As well as London’s long-established Poetry International and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (in its infancy back in the early 90s), we now have a number of annual festivals dedicated only to poetry, including those in Ledbury, St Andrews, Essex, Bristol, Dún Laoghaire and Cork, most of which began in the 1990s, and many other venues with yearround readings; and poetry is now thriving at music festivals such as Glastonbury and Latitude. Meanwhile, the study of creative writing at degree and postgraduate levels has boomed in Britain and Ireland. In recent years, the number of women poets published has caught up with and, some years, exceeded the number of men, a fact reflected in the selection here, the first time this kind of anthology has included more women than men. In the publishing world, the situation has toughened as bookshops are stocking less poetry, but online sales and sales at readings have kept figures buoyant, and the poetry business is faring far better than journalists would have us believe.

Oxford University Press’s decision to axe its ailing poetry list was one factor in Picador’s development of its then small poetry list, and also the spur for the new Oxford Carcanet list. Random House’s Cape Poetry list was revived in the mid-1990s. While the two main independent poetry presses, Carcanet and Bloodaxe – and Gallery in Ireland – continued to thrive, two newer presses broadened and bloomed: Seren, formerly concentrating on Welsh writers, flourished by seeking poets from a wider arc; Cambridge-based Salt began as a publisher of innovative poetry then widened the scope of its list. Nearly half the poets included here are published as part of poetry lists which didn’t exist at the beginning of the 1990s.

Given a choice of around a thousand poets, it was necessary to restrict the selection process. I include only poetry in English, by those who are actively still writing poetry. Agewise, there is no restriction on poets who first published after 2000; however, I decided that a number of poets over 50 who first published in the 1990s belonged to the previous generation. It stretches any definition to describe a 55-year old who published the first of several books 15 years ago as a ‘new poet’. I include a few poets born abroad who have lived here for over a decade and who have only published here. Eighty-five poets may seem a large number, but three factors warrant this: the breadth of poetry showcased; a longer gap (17 years) than is usual between such books; and the increase in the number of first collections being published each year.

Despite the amount of media attention given to poetry (often concentrating on prizes and personalities, with review space diminishing), there is a sense of scaling back by the commercial publishers of poetry, with imprints such as Faber, Cape and Picador only publishing a handful of books of original poetry each year. Faber’s concentration on its backlist means there are only three poets in this anthology who made their debut with them. The commercial lists rarely have more than around 20 poets in their stables and are all but full. Much of the risk involved in introducing new poets is taken by independent publishers.

The main purpose of a generational anthology, as I see it, is not to act as a canonical document of an era, but to spread the word, to educate, to recommend. I’d be surprised if there is a single reader who is familiar with the work of all the poets I have selected. I want readers to discover them and buy the books whose range and vigour are represented by the limited selections from the poets here. Many of them are indeed new, or are undersung, or work away from the areas or kinds of poetry promoted by larger publishers and the media.

British and Irish poets have, over the past century, employed an increasingly diverse sweep of practices and compositional processes. Within Identity Parade, the reader will find poems in both conventional and innovative styles and which take their influence from both traditions at once. There are writers here whose main drive is narrative, while others are more interested in the texture and sound of language, or in metrical form. A number of poets here started out on the live poetry scene; others are affiliated with various groupings of experimental writers. In the past, generational anthologies have tended to overlook such poets, from outside of what is reluctantly and ambiguously described as ‘the mainstream’; indeed some anthologists appear to have pretended that such poetries did not exist, or to have employed tokenism in this regard. Morrison and Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry featured just 20 poets, less a generation, more a supper party. Though some commentators have suggested that an inclusive anthology is a diluted one, I can’t agree – an open-minded reader will find poetry here to challenge their supposed tastes.

Edward Lucie-Smith’s 1970 British Poetry Since 1945 anthology – which served as my own introduction to contemporary poetry – was a hybrid, mainly documenting the poets of the late 1950s and the 1960s, but casting an eye back to the previous generation. He wrote then that, ‘The evidence seems to be in favour of the notion that British poetry is currently in a period of exploration, and that it is not in the thrall of any dominant figure, or even of any dominant literary or political idea. It is for this reason that I have cast my net so wide, and have chosen to represent so many writers.’ Forty years later, after a period with a supposed dominant figure (Seamus Heaney, according to Morrison and Motion’s anthology) and a period of supposed politicised aesthetics, we are at ease again in ‘a period of exploration’ which appears to be the self-exploration of individualism.

So do the poets in Identity Parade match their times? The predominant social and cultural phenomena of the 1990s and 2000s have been diversity and information overload. We no longer watch the same handful of television channels, hear the same limited news, listen to the same clutch of bands, visit predictable tourist destinations; in our trouser pockets, most of us carry the colossal almanac that is the internet. Perhaps this is a contributory factor in the essential individualism which I see in this generation: though critics and academics will seek – and find – traits and trends in the larger bodies of work represented here, this might well be the generation of poets least driven by movements, fashions, conceptual and stylistic sharing.

1993’s The New Poetry featured poetry which had been largely written during the turbulent years of Thatcherism, and its editors presented that generation of poets as being those staging a fight-back against a seemingly less cultured society, an exaggerated truth. Overtly political poetry has been comparatively scarce since then, and much of it is ineffective, unconvincing. Even in the growth area of socially aware nature poetry, the most powerful work has been incidental, rather than that written pointedly. Poets from Northern Ireland still have to deal with a fraught political situation, but no longer seem to feel an onus to make it a dominant subject. In Britain, perhaps the brief optimism of a new government was too soon replaced with familiar distrust and despondency to raise a batch of poetic hasslers. Nonetheless this book does contain its share of protest, satire, social comment.

This anthology takes some of its inspiration from a comparable American anthology, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (ed. Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin, Sarabande Books, 2006). A subject of comment on that book was the number of fulltime academics included – especially those involved in teaching creative writing. Around a third of the poets in Identity Parade are academics – though this number divides into those who are career literary academics, those who teach other subjects, and those who have entered the teaching world later via their writing. Another third do work which is literature-related – they are publishers, promoters, school teachers, librarians or freelancers doing a mix of these and other things. The remainder do a variety of jobs – advertising copywriter, business adviser, technical writer, prison worker, musician, lawyer – or are students, retired or raising families.

A common temptation for earlier anthologists was the making of great claims for the generation. The foibles and excesses of the previous generation were chewed over and inaccurate predictions made about things to come. This book represents my own generation of British and Irish poets, and although poets are always ready to bicker, to promote their own aesthetic, it does seem a more harmonious one, more outward looking and, at last, less dominated by men and more representative of the country’s ethnic mix in the case of Britain.

It is tempting to look for connections between the writings of those in a generation. I am more interested in engaging with the poems than looking for theories of literary zeitgeist, but it is the pluralism of contemporary British and Irish poetry which stands out in the pages of this book. Plural in its register – monologue, memoir, satire, comedy, complaint; plural in its regional and ethnic diversity; plural in its subject-matter and – moving from traditional metrics to fractured syntax, from dialect to diatribe, mirror poem to prose poem – satisfyingly plural in its form and style. 20

PATIENCE AGBABI

Patience Agbabi was born in 1965 and grew up in London, Sussex and North Wales. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University and Creative Writing, the Arts and Education at Sussex University. After a brief spell in publishing, she has been a freelance writer and performer since 1990. She has also taught creative writing in a range of educational establishments including Cardiff and Kent Universities and has worked abroad with the British Council. In 2004 she was nominated one of the UK’s ‘Next Generation Poets’. Her collections are R.A.W. (Gecko Press, 1995), Transformatrix (Canongate, 2000) and Bloodshot Monochrome (Canongate, 2008).

A leading performance poet, Agbabi’s early work helped to feminise British rap, though she has a strong formal bent influenced by an engagement with poets from previous eras (her ‘Wife of Bafa’, one of many persona monologues, is based on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath). The subjects of race, sexuality and, more recently, motherhood have been strong presences in her work, along with an embracing of popular culture motifs, often drawn from her passionate interest in music.

The Wife of Bafa

My name is Mrs Alice Ebi Bafa

I come from Nigeria.

I am very fine, isn’t it.

My next birthday I’ll be…twenty-nine.

I’m business woman.

Would you like to buy some cloth?

I have all the latest styles from Lagos,

Italian shoe and handbag to match,

lace, linen and Dutch wax.

I only buy the best

and I travel first class.

     Some say I have blood on my hands

’cause I like to paint my nails red

but others call me femme fatale.

My father had four wives

so I’ve had five husbands.

I cast a spell with my gap-tooth smile

and my bottom power.

Three were good and two were bad.

     The first three were old and rich

and I was young and fit.

They died of exhaustion.

The fourth one was ladies’ man,

I could not count his women on one hand

but he’d rage if I looked at another man.

I was very wild when I was young.

They called me Miss Highlife,

I was not considered a good wife

but I always respected my husband.

He died when I returned from this London.

     The fifth one I married for love.

He was studying law at University of Ibadan.

He was not yet twenty-one,

wicked in bed and so handsome

but he liked pornographic magazine.

His favourite was Playboy.

One day I threw it on fire

to teach him a lesson.

He turned into wife batterer.

He was to regret his action.

I beat him till he begged for his ancestors.

Now we get on like house on fire.

     Some say I’m a witchcraft

’cause I did not bear them children.

They do not understand the Western medicine.

     You like my headtie.

It’s the latest fashion.

They sell like hot cake on Victoria Island.

Fifty pounds.

I give you discount ’cause I like your smile.

The quality is very good.

If I take off more I will not make profit

and I travel to Lagos next week.

Make it my lucky day.

Please, I beg you.

Postmod:

a snapshot. Monochrome. A woman

in a ’60s rayon suit. A knee-length pencil

skirt and jacket with three-quarter sleeves.

Hot aqua and a mod original.

That shade translates to stylish grey. It’s me.

And on the back, someone’s scrawled in pencil

Brighton Beach, 1963

for fun because I wasn’t even thought of

in 1963. Imagine Rhyl,

’82, where the image was conceived

by someone with good taste, bad handwriting

and lack of a camera. Yet that negative,

in our heads only, was as sharp and real

as the suit so out of fashion it was in.

The London Eye

Through my gold-tinted Gucci sunglasses,

the sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime

strikes the convoy of number 12 buses

that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.

Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting

to you, Hello!…on…bridge…’minster!

The aerial view postcard, the man writing

squat words like black cabs in rush hour.

The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.

You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.

We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble

where I think, ‘Space age!’ you think, ‘She was late.’

Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .Beat™ blinks, replies

18.02. We’re moving anticlockwise.

Josephine Baker Finds Herself