Passport to Here and There

Born in Guyana, Grace Nichols has lived in Britain since 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her later poetry collections – published by Virago – include The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), Sunris (1996), winner of the Guyana Prize, and Startling the Flying Fish (2006), poems which tell the story of the Caribbean, along with several poetry books for younger readers, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988), Give Yourself a Hug (1994), Everybody Got a Gift (2005) and Cosmic Disco (2013). She has published four books with Bloodaxe, Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems (2010), The Insomnia Poems (2017), and Passport to Here and There (2020), which is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She lives in Sussex with the poet John Agard and their family.

To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers. 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. Her simple diction belies a complex emotional intellect and a feel for the balance of a line, its weightlessness in collusion with a depth of feeling. This may be Grace Nichols at her best, in poems that chime with bright imagery and lasting phrasing worthy of chanting to undermine and contradict, if not bringing down the authoritarian edifices of our dangerous times.

• 9 Preface Rites of passage14 If I Were to Meet16 Litany17 Picture My Father18 Greensleeves19 The Shilling and the Princess20 Joy-riders21 Ole Higue22 Masquerade23 Against the Tradewinds24 Confirmation25 A Chant for Mater 26 Sweet Fifteen27 Spirit-rising30 Georgetown Romance In the shade of a London plane tree32 Viewing the Thames33 In the Shade of a London Plane Tree34 O Tea35 Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November36 Robin Redbreast36 Nuptial on Brighton Beach37 The Hills in Our Memory38 Lewes Night Out39 Tea with Demerara Sugar40 Blackberrying Black Woman41 Ode to a Daffodil42 Battle43 This Destiny Back-homing: Georgetown snapshot sonnets47 Landing48 Reunion49 Where Blue Sea Turns50 Bourda51 Where My Childhood Left Him52 El Hombre del Oro53 From the Balcony of Eldorado54 Price I Pay55 In the Fleeting Now56 Like an Heiress57 Eldorado58 Sorry59 Against My Heart60 Georgetown Interesting times?63 Interesting Times?64 At Stockwell Tube65 In Praise of Surgeons66 Kittitian Girl67 Faith68 Helen of the Gables69 To Mark Your Passing71 A Sacrament of Words72 Lost in Translation73 Apple and Mango74 Rivers75 Dawn Wind76 Atlantic 80 Biographical note