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James Berry - Windrush Songs, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2007

Windrush Songs

Av James Berry

152 kr

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Beskrivning
These poems gives voice to the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry - from Jamaica - was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. This late collection by Berry explores the different reasons he and his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. This publication was linked with events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living: ‘Mi one milkin cow just die! / Gone, gone – and leave me / Like hurricane disaster!’ Windrush Songs ranges from from lyrical pictures of Caribbean country life to poems in the voices of travellers with desires, fears, anxieties, hopes and ambitions. James Berry came to Britain on the next ship after the Windrush and shared many of the experiences that prompted this migration in search of change and a better life. Many of the poems from Windrush were included in James Berry's A Story I Am In: New & Selected Poems, but renewed interest in Windrush Songs has prompted its reissue.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2007-06-28
  • Mått: 138 x 216 x 13 mm
  • Vikt: 136 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 72
  • Förlag: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
  • ISBN: 9781852247706
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James Berry (1924-2017) was born and brought up in a tiny seaside village in Jamaica. He learnt to read before he was four years old, mostly from the Bible, which he often read aloud to his mother’s friends. When he was 17, he went to work in America, but hated the way black people were treated there, and returned to Jamaica after four years. In 1948, he made his way to Britain, and took a job working for British Telecom. One of the first black writers in Britain to achieve wider recognition, Berry rose to prominence in 1981 when he won the National Poetry Competition. His numerous books include two seminal anthologies of Caribbean poetry, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (Chatto, 1984). His retrospective, A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), draws on five collections of poetry, including Fractured Circles (1979) and Lucy’s Letters and Loving (1982) from New Beacon Books, Chain of Days (Oxford University Press, 1985), and Hot Earth Cold Earth (1995) and Windrush Songs (2007) from Bloodaxe. Windrush Songs was published to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. He also published several books of poetry and short stories for children (from Hamish Hamilton, Puffin and Walker Books), and won many literary prizes, including the Smarties Prize (1987), the Signal Poetry Award (1989) and a Cholmondeley Award (1991). He was awarded the OBE in 1990.

Recensioner i media

Berry came to Britain from Jamaica in 1948. In the introduction to this collection of poems, he explains why he came to Britain and left a country he loved. 'Beginning in a City, 1948' in particular gives a strong impression of what Caribbean arrivals experienced in their first hours and days. The emigrant experience is often littered with contradictions… and Berry’s poems illustrate this perfectly.

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