Way of the Poet

Roy McFarlane is a Poet, Writer and former Youth and Community Worker born in Birmingham, spending most of his years in the Black Country and now living in Brighton. He’s the former National Canal Laureate and Birmingham Poet Laureate. His three collections are published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning with Your Last Breath, The Healing Next Time (shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize) and Living by Troubled Waters.

Praise for Living by Troubled Waters:“Roy’s poetry has always been about history and liturgy, outrage and melody, meditation and agitation wrapped up in careful metrics of love… His sense of the UK’s black heritage and his insistence that it must be recognized power his sonorous poems. If there is a seer in current poetics, someone who stands before an audience that shouts, ‘preach’ and that person delivers passionate compositions that cry for justice and champion the disenfranchised, destroyed and silenced, then surely, our best candidate is Roy.” - Fred D’Aguiar“Behold the poet building his house of language on altars to the dispossessed, the underserved, the marginalised, the survivors of empire: you cannot quit such radical urgency. You cannot tune McFarlane’s lyrical anguish or adoration out of your system: it lingers in the blood, like soul music, like good Jamaican Sunday lunch.” - Shivanee Ramlochan“Roy McFarlane has created one of the most affecting and original explorations of race in modern times.” - Antony Owen