
In Nearby Bushes
Kei Miller(Author)
Carcanet Poetry (Publisher)
Published on 29. August 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
88 pages
978-1-78410-845-8 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020
Longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019
The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet - the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.
Longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019
The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet - the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.
Reviews / Votes
This is a book that offers a wise, colourful and unflinching look at contemporary Jamaica - good and bad - and anyone who loves language will find it utterly intoxicating.'Roger Cox, The Scotsman 'This grab-you-by-the-collar collection uses the undergrowth as a symbol for Jamaica's dark side.'
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph 'In Kei Miller's case, perceptions of Jamaica play out wittily through dialect and toponym, and are set against violent circumstances, explored with a profound awareness of their cultural and historical causes.'
W. N. Herbert, The Poetry Review 'Miller surpasses expectations for a book to be about something, as if a book's purpose were merely to convey information, or to create an experience. To read In Nearby Bushes is to be guided into thinking through things, however uncomfortable or uncanny.'
Vahni Capildeo 'Kei Miller has always had a distinct relationship to ideas of place, able - as the best cartographers are - to make sense of territory new or previously overlooked, and point us to why we should be looking there, and what we should be looking for: the stories that are being buried, being forgotten... This method of directing us to what we really need to pay attention to, and where it is happening, is at the core of Miller's latest collection'
Rishi Dastidar, Poetry London 'Miller's formal and linguistic inventiveness are at their best in his lively analysis of patois and etymology... Miller combines reportage, poetry, essay, psalmistry and erasure to show... the book of poems as a site of potential'
Dominic Leonard, Times Literary Supplement 'Miller deftly uses caesuras,line breaks and antimetabole to keep the reader pivoting between meanings, between growth and rot.'
Wasafari 'Lyrical contemplation brings to the fore the Jamaican landscape in which the collection is set and its inextricable relationship to racialized violence... The frequency with which these poems deploy the signifier bush but nevertheless find ways to reimagine its social, political, and aesthetic potentials suggests that we may no sooner exhaust our compulsion for clarity than our desire for obscurity.'
Joseph Fritsch, Public Books 'Miller's lush, contemplative poetic style is on full display, as is formal innovation with a boundary-breaking structure setting critical 'micro-essays' in conversation with verse ... This collection is a powerful testament to his acuity as both poet and critic.'
Sarah-Jean Zubair, Magma
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 134 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
125 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-845-8 (9781784108458)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Person
Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and has written several books across a range of genres. His 2014 collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection while his 2017 Novel, Augustown, won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraibe et du Tout-Monde. He is also an award-winning essayist. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. Kei has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter. He is the 2019 Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Author photo (c) Christine Fourie.
Kei Miller has a page on the Poetry Archive website, where you can listen to recordings of his poetry and access other useful resources. Click here.
Author photo (c) Christine Fourie.
Kei Miller has a page on the Poetry Archive website, where you can listen to recordings of his poetry and access other useful resources. Click here.