Jean Binta Breeze – författare

The Verandah Poems was both a departure and a return for Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention – of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It was Breeze's first new collection after Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and was published on her 60th birthday. Foreword by Kei Miller. With photographs by Tehron Royes.

The Verandah Poems is both a departure and a return for Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention - of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It is Breeze''s first new collection since Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and is published on her 60th birthday. ''The third world girl, at home for a while, sets these attractive poems in rural Jamaica. Her verandah looks out on the sea, and she goes for a swim most mornings. The collection takes us well beyond the village, the bar across the road, and the men who proposition her. The easy-going voice talks of personal development, celebrates friends and family, comments on mortality, freedom, gender and class. The poet is examining, subtly, a more or less contented return to where her life began.'' - Mervyn Morris ‘A major, perhaps even a great voice. For stature, Jean “Binta” Breeze invites a Caribbean comparison with Maya Angelou, except that her range is broader still. Her poetry shifts effortlessly through standard English to a native Jamaican which has no equal in its emotional depth.’ - Alexander Linklater, The Herald ‘Breeze sings of sisterhood and the private spirituality that keeps the head above water even when prejudice, and laundry, threaten to drag it down. Her work, and that of a great many other black women writers, affirms life in a way that the rest of the world might do well to emulate.’ - Tania Glyde, Independent

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances were so powerful she has been called a 'one-woman festival'. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life.The Fifth Figure was her sixth book, and saw Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean 'Binta' Breeze's Third World Girl: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition, nor the later collection, The Verandah Poems (2016).