Passport to Here and There

By Grace Nichols

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. 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).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780375335

Grace Nichols

Grace Nichols is one of Britain's most highly-acclaimed poets. Born in Guyana, she moved to England in 1977. She has won many prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her A & C Black titles include Come on into My Tropical Garden and Give Yourself a Hug. Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and has lived in England since 1977. She has written many books for both children and adults and has won, among other awards, the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She was poet-in-residence at the Tate Gallery, London (1999-2000). Grace Nichols performs her work internationally and is one of the poets on the UK national curriculum.

Book preview

GRACE NICHOLS

PASSPORT TO HERE AND THERE

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

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, to turn the ordinary into something sensuous 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.

Atlantic – now sleeping in the distance

peaceful as a dog glossed by the morning sun.

Atlantic – now churning up an army of wild horses,

white manes threatening a biblical leaping

or brooding on the ships that bruised your memory

‘Not only rich music, an easy lyricism, but also grit, and earthy honesty, a willingness to be vulnerable and clean.’ – Gwendolyn Brooks

‘Grace Nichols in this new collection of her work succeeds in revisiting her Guyana past to make poems of lightness and diction and depth of feeling. The Demerara region takes on heraldic relevance and the people in it, principally her parents, along with flora and fauna, populate a landscape of metaphoric and allegorical longing. This may be Grace Nichols at her best.’ – Fred D’Aguiar

Cover art (detail): Dub Factor: White Christmas 1 (j) (2008-09) by Victor Davson

Acrylic on treated vinyl LP record album cover 31.43cm x 31.43cm

GRACE NICHOLS

Passport to Here

and There

with photographs by

COMPTON DAVIS

For my sisters and brother,

Avril, Valerie and Dennis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications where a few of these poems or versions of them first appeared: ‘Sweet Fifteen’, Jubilee Lines, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (Faber & Faber, 2012); ‘At Stockwell Station’, 1914: Poetry Remembers, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (Faber & Faber, 2014); ‘The Shilling and the Princess’, Ploughshares (USA) Spring 2015 translantic poetry issue, ed. Neil Astley; ‘Battle’, Peace Poetry to mark the centenary of Wilfred Owen published by the Royal Society of Literature (2018); ‘O Tea’, published in the 100th issue of Wasafiri (2019).

Special thanks to Victor Davson, Guyanese artist, whose painting, White Christmas is on the cover of this book, and to Compton Davis for his photographs of Georgetown. I would also

Reviews for Passport to Here and There

[spiralsheep · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

84/2020. The most recent collection of poems by Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols, with a scattering of black and white photos by Compton Davis of the old wooden buildings of Georgetown the capital city of Guyana.Preface: "One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure."And those are the themes of this collection: childhood in Guyana; home in Sussex; revisiting Georgetown but with no ghosts to lay to rest; and praise poems for friends. Nichols appears to have reached a comfortable point in her life and the lack of tension in most of these poems reflects her achievement, but some of the people she's written praise-poems for are no longer among the living, and the river delta land of Guyana is under threat from climate change with some of the Dutch-colonial city of Georgetown built on reclaimed land as much as eight feet below sea level (the old buildings in the accompanying photos all conspicuously have their main living rooms above ground level). The author knows development of recently discovered offshore oil resources could change Guyana beyond recognition.There is also the music of this accomplished poet's carefully chosen forms, with a sonnet sequence that worked especially well for me, and some outstanding images: "shooting stars of black tadpoles" being both literal pollywogs and symbols of the children who grew and changed and moved away.If you appreciate Grace Nichols' work then you'll like this but I wouldn't say it's the best place to meet her for the first time.